Rainbow Coin Toss: St. Patrick's Day Game

Celebrate the luck of the Irish with this coin toss game

Submitted by
Kayla Chong

We haven't met a kid (or an adult, for that matter) who isn't fascinated by rainbows and money. "Oooh, look, a rainbow! Oooh, look, there's five bucks in these jeans!" That'd be a great day, right? Give your kid a great rainbow/money day by turning both into a game. Challenge your kid to toss some "gold" into a pot of gold to score some major points. (And then have him clean it up and put it away to score even more major points.)

Pot of gold:
A clean, empty Tupperware container or butter or margarine tub.
Black tempera paint and a paintbrush
Poster board
Markers, crayons or paints:
In every color of the rainbow, naturally.
A black marker
A ruler or a yardstick:
If your kid (or you) is a stickler for straight lines.
Two pipe cleaners
A sharp knife or hole-puncher:
To be used only by the grownup helper!
Prizes:
Unadulterated praise, stickers, cars, cookies, you name it.
Players:
One or more.
Coins:
Cold hard cash, chocolate money, poker chips or, for the wee ones, try a currency they can understand, like baby jar lids.

First, have your kid make the game. Invite him to draw a long, straight rainbow on a piece of poster board, spanning the entire length of the paper. If he doesn't already know the colors of the rainbow, teach him about ROY-G-BIV (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet) and call it an art/science lesson.
Help him divide the rainbow into segments, drawing straight black lines across the rainbow every five inches or so. (An opportunity for a math lesson! Aren't you just the savvy little teacher?)
Write the number in each segment to indicate the number of points a player will get if their coin lands there. Getting a coin into the pot of gold scores 100 points, so mark the points accordingly in descending value towards the other end of the rainbow, with 10 the farthest away from the end where the pot will go.
Next, have your kid scrub out an old margarine or butter tub and paint it black, inside and out, like a genuine "pot."
Poke a hole at the top of both sides of the pot with a sharp knife or hole-puncher.
Have him loop the end of a pipe cleaner through each hole, twisting them together in the middle where they meet to create a handle.
Time to play! Have your kid place the pot at the end of the rainbow.
Then have him stand back away from the rainbow and hand him a stack of coins.
Challenge him to toss the coins at the pot of gold, aiming to get as many into the pot as he can.
When he gets 100 points, either by a slam-dunk into the pot or by accruing points along the way, he wins a prize. You can reward him with all the coins he got into the pot or with a small prize.
Have him invite friends or play with siblings to create a little competition. The first person to 100 wins the prize.