Opportunities to Use This Craft

There are so many fun occasions to pull out this craft and do it with your kiddos. Here are some fitting opportunities when this rainbow craft could come in handy:

• Saint Patrick’s Day Activity
• Tool for Teaching the Rainbow Colors
• Practicing Color Identification/Fine Motor Skills
• Celebration of Spring
• National Find a Rainbow Day Craft – on April 3rd!
• Teaching About Different Types of Weather
• Rainy Day Activity
• After-School Entertainment

Whether you have a young child who is just learning their colors or an older child who loves independent activities, this is a great activity for kids of all ages!

Fruit Loop Animal Crafts

Fruit Loop Fish- This craft provides children with a threading activity that makes fish from fruit loops and pipe cleaners. Threading a cereal loop onto the end of the pipe cleaner is a great fine motor and eye hand coordination task. Cute and fun!

Loop Cereal Starfish Craft- This craft gives the opportunity for rainbow color sequencing to create a decorative starfish. It’s a great way to sequence the colors of the rainbow after maybe cutting out the starfish first.

Fruit Loop Cereal Jellyfish- This craft is a fun tracing activity of the hand that turns into a jellyfish. Following the tracing and cutting out of the hand, the child will then glue fruit loop pieces onto it to make it more colorful. Kiddos will sort fruit loop colors and work on the functional skills of pencil, scissors, and glue to make this cute craft.

Another fun idea craft that includes a threading aspect which is important for fine motor skill development, plus if you can find a jellyfish printable can include a coloring aspect too! Oh, and don’t forget the eye-hand coordination skills needed to string those fruit loops.

Mouse craft- This craft is a cute craft that allows for color matching of the fruit loops to the whiskers and then the child threads the mouse’s whiskers. This one can easily be re-used as a station activity or if you prefer, sent home as a craft. Fun!

How to make a Fruit Loop Rainbow

There are many variations on this rainbow craft, as you can see from the list below. However, a simple rainbow craft is all you need to do to work on fine motor skills and visual motor development.

You need just a couple of items:

• Box of Fruit Loop cereal or an off-brand round loop cereal that comes in different colors
• bowl
• Rainbow template on a piece of paper
• Glue
• Cotton balls if you want to add clouds at the end of the rainbow

Children can use the rainbow template to glue the colorful cereal pieces onto each layer of the rainbow. When they do this, they are using a pincer grasp to pick up the cereal pieces from the bowl.

A tip to expand on fine motor skills is to use a more narrow or smaller bowl or small cup. This requires the child to define their grasp into a separation of the sides of the hand, and encourage in-hand manipulation as they move the cereal pieces from the fingertips into the palm of the hand and then back to the fingertips. One easy way to do this is to use a narrow drinking cup that is labeled with the the colors of the rainbow like in our rainbow order stacking cups.

A rainbow template can be as simple as a rainbow lines drawn onto construction paper or a paper plate, or it can be a printable rainbow template like the ones we have inside the Member’s Club. These printable rainbows have both a row for the colorful cereal to be placed into according to color, and others have circles for placing each colored cereal piece.

Skills that are addressed with this portion of the activity:

• Eye-hand coordination
• Visual discrimination
• Color recognition
• Visual motor skills
• Fine motor skills

The entire rainbow can be made by sorting colors out the cereal into bowls or piles of colors, then gluing them onto the paper. The color of the fruit loops can be matched up to count out the number of each color while working on finger isolation in order to count each piece. We used a similar concept in our rainbow sorting activity with an ice cube tray.

Finally, work on hand strengthening by pulling apart a cotton ball to fluff it up and gluing that onto the paper at the end of the rainbow shape. Stretching out a cotton ball with the finger tips is a great way to address several areas of development:

• Hand strengthening
• Arch development
• Intrinsic strength
• Bilateral coordination

Fruit Loops Rainbow Craft for Toddlers and Preschoolers

Fruit loops are not only a cereal kids can enjoy from time to time, you can also use them for cute rainbow crafts!

I love using food for various activities with my boys since they get so excited about the fact that they can eat it afterwards (or while they’re doing the activity). So it’s a great way to get them engaged and motivated to do the activity.

In the past, we’ve used Cheerios for counting activities, and my son’s favorite part was snacking on the Cheerios!

We also made these marshmallow structures for an easy STEM activity for my boys. It was so much fun! Lots of the marshmallows ended up in their tummies as well 🙂