Pot O' Gold Number Hunt

St. Patrick's Day is one of my favorite holidays to celebrate with kids because it is pretty low key and I don't have to give my kids anything. I also absolutely love that it is associated with rainbows because during this rainy time of year where we live the rainbows make things a bit more cheery!

This week we decided to make our own rainbow and hunt for gold to fill up our big pot! We matched numbers 1-15 while we played!

MATERIALS NEEDED:

circle craft punch
yellow cardstock
black cardstock
scissors
painters tape
black Sharpie
Do-a-dot markers
large roll of paper

DIRECTIONS:

You can make this as fancy or as simple as you would like! We started by rolling out a big sheet of paper and drawing a rainbow with do-a-dot markers. Next we cut out a pot from black paper and taped it under the rainbow.

Lastly we drew spots for 15 gold coins and numbered them 1-15.

After that we used out craft circle punch to cut out 15 yellow circles from yellow cardstock. We numbered the circles 1-15.

After all of the materials were ready I hid the "gold coins" around the house and the kids started hunting for them!

They worked together to find the coins and match them to the correct spots on the rain/pot o' gold board.

Once they matched all fifteen coins then they took turns hiding them again. We played this game hiding and matching again and again and again!

I loved watching how my kids worked together as a team. It was also fun to see where they hid things. My 3-year-old would often hide an entire stack of coins in one spot. Over time he learned more creative ways to space them out and hide them as he watched his older sister.

This was a great way to practice counting and number recognition. For littler kids you can just skip the numbers and just hunt for the gold coins... and match them to the blank circles!

We did a similar number gold hunting activity with felt a few years ago.