Rainbow Hunt

This is kind of a Part 2 to yesterday's post. Whereas yesterday was mostly all about dad working with the kids, today's activity was more my contribution.

About a week prior I had found a scavenger hunt sort of idea on The Crafting Chicks, that I really liked. So I printed out the shamrocks and laminated them and came up with clues of my own (written in an Irish accent, of course).

On Friday night, after the kids went to bed, we sprung all the traps, took the gold, and left this shamrock to start off the fun.

The Crafting Chicks have very graciously provided shamrocks in all the colors of the rainbow for your printing convenience, so it was super easy to put this activity together. At the end of the hunt (the purple shamrock) the kids found a pot of golden candies to share. I would have liked to make a more elaborate "treasure" for the kids to find, but time and budget didn't allow. Thankfully, my kids are always pretty excited about candy :-)

We had a lot of fun starting out our day this way. But I have to admit that the traps were WAY more exciting to the kids than the rainbow hunt. It's true that they enjoyed the hunt, but all they were really interested in was how those dang leprechauns got away. And why didn't our traps hold them? And, they must be a lot smarter than we thought. And, NEXT year we are going to build WAY stronger traps that they can't get out of.

Apparently, parental cheating of the experiment isn't the best idea. Eventually I had to break it to them. The truth about the leprechauns--and daddy's and my deception. They were good sports. They laughed. Then they started on their plans to make the trickiest leprechaun trap EVER.