Rainbow Science FREEBIE

We have Color Days in September and celebrate at the end with Rainbow Day with lots of activities.

Every color day, I make a bottle of colored water.  Of course, on the secondary color days I miraculously "can't find" the orange, green and purple "rainbow drops", so we brainstorm how we will make it.  Eventually, the children come up with mixing the colors and we create "magic" in the bottles using the primary colored water.  The really neat thing is that when you hold the bottles one in front of the other (ex. red in front of yellow), you can actually see it making orange before you actually mix the colors together!

We write a different color book each color book.  The children love the repetitiveness in them and choose to read them over and over (oh, they also love the fact that they are the authors and illustrators of these books as well).  The covers and page templates are in my Celebrating Our Colorful World Unit.

We make mosaic rainbows on black paper.  I just cut strips of each rainbow color and then cut squares and rectangles (to also reinforce our basic shape unit we do at the beginning of the year).  I copy a rainbow onto black paper that has Rs where the the red shapes go, Os where the orange shapes go, etc.  This is so fun and makes a great display when they are all done.

This is my favorite activity to do during Rainbow Day.  It reinforces what we've been learning about colors and also gives the children the opportunity to explore mixing colors themselves.  After we read Mouse Paint by Ellen Stoll Walsh (a book about white mice trying to hide from a cat by dancing in puddles of different colored paint).  After the story, I tell them I have some mice for them (cotton balls) that they can reenact the story with.  I put a glob of red, blue, and yellow paint on the corresponding paint jars  Then they need to mix two colors together in each of the puddles by making the cotton ball mouse dance in one color, then dance in the next! So fun.  I usually draw my own posters (as seen below), but, I thought I'd make up a printable for all of you to enlarge onto 11x17 paper for your kiddos to try the dancing mice activity.

Click here to grab this activity FREE!