The Year of Color {Green} Edition

First and foremost, Happy St. Patrick's Day!!

With this month's Year of Color prompt being green a few ideas immediately came to mind. Naturally, St. Patrick's Day was our primary focus.

Let's start with the monthly mom and kids pic.

I've been sporting this t-shirt for the last three or four St. Patrick's Day and it never gets old. There's nothing better than showing a little Iowa love whenever we can! Bonus points for actually being Catholic and part Irish to really the holiday a boost.

Moving along to the more hands-on portion of our green prompt.

Read

While we don't have any St. Patrick's Day books in our collection, we DO have Green Eggs and Ham! Per our usual routine while Julia naps, we pulled this book off the shelf and got cozy. 

Since reading this for the prompt Marcus has requested to hear Green Eggs and Ham several times. 

Bake

This may be the easiest "baking" I've ever done. I mean, does a two "ingredient" recipe that calls for microwaving even count as baking?? But, Marcus helped with a majority of it, and he loved the snack as the outcome, so I'm calling it baking.

Shamrock Pretzels

Small pretzels

1 bag of white candy melts 

10-15 drops of green food coloring

Sprinkles - optional (but necessary)

Parchment paper

Melt candy melts according to package instructions, add green food coloring.

Dip pretzel into green candy melt.

Lay pretzel on parchment paper, repeat three more times, and arrange pretzels so they resemble shamrocks. 

Add sprinkles before candy coating dries.

Right on cue, Julia woke from her nap juuuuuuust in time to eat a shamrock pretzel of her own.

Experiment

When in doubt, grab baking soda and vinegar. Explosions are a sure fire way to keep a kid excited and entertained. With this experiment we simply added blue food coloring to baking soda, yellow food coloring to vinegar, grabbed a bottle with a skinny neck, and went to town.

We talked about how the vinegar reacts with the baking soda to make it explode. We also talked about how when the blue and yellow colors were mixed the explosion was green. You know, simple science stuff.

When the explosion first happened Marcus was a little unsure about the whole thing. But as the fizzing and erupting continued he thought it was really cool.

Marcus has asked no less than 347 times to do this experiment again. And, who am I to say no?

Green Explosion

1/4 cup baking soda

5-10 drops blue food coloring

1/2 cup vinegar 

10-15 drops yellow food coloring

Mix baking soda and blue food coloring together, stir until blue is fully incorporated.

Combing vinegar and yellow food coloring, mix so yellow is fully incorporated.

Add baking soda to a bottle with a funneled top (this makes the explosion more dramatic).

Pour vinegar into bottle.

Watch the reaction create and explosion.

Since the Green Explosion lasted about 10 seconds, I figured we would try our hand at an experiment that took a few days. 

We simply put vinegar on pennies and waited to see what happened. 

After about four days we saw that our pennies were no longer shiny and copper colored. Rather, they had turned green where the vinegar had settled.

Green Pennies

A few pennies

Vinegar

Paper towel

Place pennies on a paper towel.

Pour vinegar on the pennies and saturate the paper towel. 

Allow pennies to set for several hours/days. 

The longer the pennies set in vinegar the more green they become.

Note: We had to add more vinegar to the pennies and paper towel on the second day.

Each morning of this experiment we would check on our pennies to see if any more green had formed. It was kind of fun to have that to look forward to before we headed into our morning routines. 

Twenty-four hours with vinegar on the pennies.

Four days with vinegar on the pennies.
The color changed from green to more of a turquoise, but that's still considered part of the green family, right?

For this one, we talked about the reaction of the vinegar and copper, and how that made the pennies change colors.

Craft

This is literally the easiest craft we've ever done. Marshmallows, green paint, and some paper. 

Marshmallow Shamrock Stamps

A handful of marshmallows

Green paint

Paper

Paint brush

Dip marshmallows in green paint and stamp to create a shamrock leaf.

Use paint brush to add a stem. 

The end.

Poof. Shamrocks that were turned into snail mail for the grandparents! 

This craft took about 5 minutes, and that was just enough time to hold Marcus' attention before he asked me if he could eat the marshmallows rather than paint with them.

That's a wrap on March's green prompt! 

Did you sprinkle this month with green? If so, be sure to link up with the Year of Color below!

Next month's colors are PASTELS!

For those who like to plan well in advance:
May's prompt is YELLOW
June's color is PURPLE

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