How to Create Toddler Rainbow Art with Vibrant Suncatchers

Inside: Put together this simple toddler rainbow art activity to brighten your classroom or home! A fun way to work on color skills while putting pieces of the rainbow on sticky paper for an easy suncatcher.

This week’s theme in our toddler classroom is rainbows, and it’s one of my favorites! I love bringing color into the classroom after a dreary winter.

While our preschoolers work on the order of the colors in the rainbow, we keep it much simpler with our toddlers. We simply expose them to the colors of the rainbow with lots of hands-on exploration. (You can see my favorite rainbow collection here.)

This toddler rainbow art is all about the process of sticking colorful pieces onto Contact paper while also working on fine motor development.

find more preschool color recognition activities here

How to Create Toddler Rainbow Art with Vibrant Suncatchers

Come see the other activities we set up for our rainbow theme

What we used:

Paper plates
Contact paper
Tissue paper squares in the color of the rainbow (I purchased this pack of tissue paper and love it for lots of different projects.)
Ribbon for hanging

Assembling the suncatchers:

You will need 1 paper plate for each rainbow made.

I used my X-Acto knife to cut the centers out of the plates. (Save the centers later for another activity!)

Note: Scroll down to see my tutorial!

How to create toddler rainbow art with vibrant suncatchers

I then cut the Contact paper in a circle that was a bit larger than the center of the paper plate, so that it would also have the paper plate to stick to. I placed the Contact Paper so that the sticky side faced up when the plate was flat on the table.

I decided to protect the sticky paper by putting the paper back on it so that nothing else would stick to it until we made the suncatchers.

I also punched 2 holes in the top of the plate and tied the ribbon through it.

I cut the tissue paper into smallish pieces, making sure each child got 1 of every color in the rainbow.

Inviting your toddlers to make a rainbow suncatcher:

Before we started assembling our rainbows, we read Planting a Rainbow. This is a simple book that is perfect for toddlers and young preschoolers. We pointed out the different colors in the book as the pages were turned.

I then invited the children to make their rainbow suncatchers.

Since our toddlers have worked with sticky paper before, they understood that the pieces would stick.

Once the suncatchers were finished, I placed another piece of contact paper on top of the colored pieces, to keep them from being pulled off, and to keep anything else from sticking to the exposed Contact Paper.

We hung a few in our classroom window…