Painting Leprechaun's Gold

Kingston has been having a great time exploring fingerpainting lately, so I thought I would come up with an activity to let him delve deeper into his new found love! Since we are big into St. Patrick's Day crafts and activities right now, we decided to paint leprechaun's gold!

For this craft you will need: a piece of cardstock (any color is fine, but we used white), a piece of tinfoil bigger than your piece of cardstock, yellow fingerpaint, tape, a pair of scissors, and a glue stick!

I ripped a piece of tinfoil bigger than my piece of paper and then folded the tinfoil on all two sides so that it would make it a little more sturdy. My child is an animal when it comes to tearing paper apart, so I wanted to ensure that he could successfully paint his "gold" without tearing the aluminum foil to shreds! I then taped the two sides that were not folded under (these were the two outer edges) to his high chair and poured some yellow fingerpaint on it and let him have at it. You may or may not want to include "sweet little St. Patrick's Day hat" to you list of materials!

He loved smearing the paint all over the place. The texture of aluminum foil is so different than regular paper. He could also see his reflection in it which was really fun! After he was done, I set the painting aside to dry.

The next day, I took the dried painting (be careful because the paint WILL flake off in some areas if you do not handle it with care!) and folded the remaining sides under.

Then I took one of Kingston's stacking cups (you can use anything that is similar to the size circle you want) and traced five circles onto the painting. I gently cut them out. This will cause the foil to separate from the paper. This is where your glue stick will come in handy! Glue the foil circles to the cardstock backgrounds to provide extra support.

And here was our end result:

Leprechaun's GOLD!!! It was hard to get a good picture of it, but it came out cute. This activity could also be done to make pirate's treasure. For an older child, they could follow this activity up with a lesson on counting money or practicing other math skills. This is also cute to use in pretend play!