Over the Rainbow

Who doesn't love a rainbow? Our week was spent discovering all kinds of things about light, color and rainbows.

Skyfire by Frank Asch, is about Moonbear who thinks the sky is on fire when he sees a rainbow for the very first time.

There were trails of colors on the floor...we hopped on them as we moved throughout the room.

A fun game was played with them as well. We had a big dice to roll. Color words were printed on each side. We took turns rolling the big dice and "reading" the color name. The rest of us had to go to a shape that color and name something that is that color.

Lining up color strips on a sticky board made for some great rainbows.

We used colored sticks to sort, line up and build with. We also used them to make letters of the alphabet.

Our light box was in our science area, which is always a great place for exploration and discovery. We had translucent colored shapes, plastic cups and colored water bottles to place on the box.

It was fun to paint rainbows at the easel. We used primary colors to paint with and mix.

The sensory bin was filled with pom poms of all colors. We had fun sorting them using tongs, plastic tweezers, and clear bottles and cups.

We read Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister 

and then made rainbow fish of our own using paper plates, colored tissue paper and pieces of tin foil.

A favorite activity of the week was making rainbow slime. We used clear glue, liquid starch and our choice of color to measure and mix. The more we mixed it together with our hands, the better the texture became. Playing with slime is addicting!

What would it be like to have a rainbow of our very own? In A Rainbow of My Own by Don Freeman, 

a little boy imagines what it would be like to have his own rainbow to play with. We used buttons, beads, foam shapes and pom poms to make our own rainbow. We had to match the collage materials to the color on the rainbow.

One of our favorite sensory materials is water beads. We had water beads of rainbow colors to sort, mix and pour.

For snack one day, we had colored cereal to sort by color and make a rainbow.

We watched colors diffuse as we dripped water onto a piece of paper towel with a rainbow. We had a variety of results depending on how much water was dripped. Each was beautiful!

A great experiment was making a cloud in a jar. We filled the jar with water and covered it with shaving cream. That was our cloud. We then dripped food coloring through the cloud. A rainbow formed in the water below the cloud.

After reading A Rainbow Garden by Lois Ehlert,

we used sponges and green construction paper strips to make a rainbow garden of our own.

A week of rainbow couldn't go by without some kind of nutritious rainbow food, so rainbow kabobs were served with lunch one day. They consisted of red strawberries, oranges, bananas, blueberries, kiwi and purple grapes.

Rainbows can be beautiful and delicious!