Hanging Rainbow St. Patrick’s Day Craft

This loopy rainbow St. Patrick’s Day craft from 123 Homeschool 4 Me was designed to be a simple craft for little ones to work on their skills making paper chains and adding gold to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

These are great fine-motor skill builders, but when I saw this project I immediately thought it could be a STEM project, too.

How strong is a paper chain? How much weight can it hold hanging from the ceiling or when held in your hand? If you taped coins to the pot instead of paper, how many would it hold before the chain broke? Does making the chain longer make it stronger? What if you used strips of poster board instead of construction paper?

Or course a craft can just be a craft, but it’s fun to think about extension activities that take it into the realm of engineering and making predictions and doing experiments, too.

Whichever way you make it, head to the blog for details and links to tons of printable activities for St. Patrick’s Day.

[Photo: 123 Homeschool 4 Me.]

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Learning about Women in STEM

Giving math a holiday twist is fun for kids of any age, but little ones especially will have more fun learning math concepts when there’s a bit of Christmas involved. Check out more Christmas math activities for older kids here.

Teaching Mama has a great set of printable Christmas activities for preschoolers, most of with have some connection to math. There’s connect the dots, repeating patterns, counting, color by number, number puzzles and more. And it’s totally free!

Practice counting by making candy canes with pipe cleaners and beads. This is such an easy activity and a great idea, I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before. Get all the details from Nurture Store. You could also turn these into little wreaths or other holiday shapes if you want.

Print out the counting mats from Living Life and Learning, grab some festive little pompoms or other counters (Christmas erasers, coins in red and green, whatever you have handy) and kids can practice counting numbers from 1 to 12 and working on one to one correspondence.

Preschool Play and Learn has a similar idea using Christmas tree shapes, but these don’t have spaces for you to add the decorations, just numbers for the number to add to each one. These are meant to be playdough mats, but you could also use pom poms, beads or even miniature Christmas ornaments to decorate your trees while you count to 20.

Or try these printable Christmas number puzzles from Math Kids and Chaos. The two-part puzzles feature a number on one side and the same number of some Christmas-themed thing on the other side. The edges of the pieces only match with the one that’s correct. You could combine this one with a counting activity to have kids count out the number of counters that the numeral shows, then match with the piece that shows that number of things and count them again. The set includes puzzles with numbers one to 10 and ten frames with numbers one to 20.

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