Rainbow Theme

So after we finished St. Patrick's Day, the only real logical next step was to learn about rainbows. Because of the age of my boy, I tied in learning about rainbows with learning about colors and the mixing of colors to make new ones.

Literacy: I cut out different shapes and colored them to go with a poem that I found.  You could also turn these pieces into a felt board story if you so wish.  Here's the poem.

Colors

Red, red.  I see red.

It's an apple growing overhead.

Yellow, yellow.  I see yellow. A big banana, long and mellow.

Orange, orange.  Can it be?

An orange growing on a tree.

Blue, blue.  I see blue.  My kitten's eyes - she says, "Mew, mew."

Green, green.  I see green.

From my garden, one string bean.

Purple, purple.  What do I see?

Grapes on a vine, just for me.

White, white.  I see white.

Fluffy cloud, so soft and light.

Literacy: I found this file folder game in one of my books and made it for this special week. It teaches the beginning sounds of words so that children can match the pictures to the lowercase letters.  If you don't have a book with file folder games, I highly recommend you purchase one because they are a great tool for teaching and learning. You can check out this website for great file folder books and printables.

Music: We made a xylophone and then learned about the mixing of colors to make a rainbow.  We talked about the order of the colours in a rainbow.

Art: Rainbow Painting with Cotton Balls

This art project was very easy to set up and clean up.  We talked together about the many different colours of paint that we would need to create a rainbow.  I then put a cotton ball in each colour and let the children dab and spread the paint onto their paper. 

Fine Motor: Cutting Paint Chips

This was a two part activity, however only the first part worked out. 

Part One:

The kids worked with their little scissors to cut along the white lines on the paint chips.  Once this was done, they sorted and mixed the paint chips according to their colours.  They had fun mixing and matching and seeing the differences in colours (light blue to dark blue and all the other blues in between for example)

Part Two:

I printed numerals onto the paint chips that they had cut out and gave my boy (4 years old) a single hole punch.  The goal was to punch out the correct number of holes.  He tried SO hard to squeeze the hole punch, but he just couldn't do it.  It caused a lot of frustration so I highly recommend NOT doing this activity with children unless they are older (probably 7 or 8) because the paint chips are just too thick.