Rainbow Week Wrap-Up

Rainbow week complete!

Yes, it was more than a week for us, but we're still away from home so "on schedule" is just not a term I'm familiar with lately. 

I'll probably still do some more letter Rr sound review when we get home, but overall I'd call this week a success in terms of both fun and education. This was a very smiley unit for us!

(I'll post more on our review activities if and when we do them.)

Here's a wrap-up of all of our Rainbows/Noah/Letter Rr activties:

You can find detailed pictures of our Rainbows lapbook and links to all the free printables HERE.

We started off our Rainbow week right by reading the story of Noah in The Child's Story Bible. We also read lots of other great rainbow books this week. You can see my book picks at the bottom of the page. To go along with our Noah story, Dude played with the popsicle stick puppets from our lapbook (link above).

   

He also went through the color matching flip book to match up the colored animals with the correct color words. (link above) He liked this a lot.

He did some "clean" painting with water using this Tigger and Pooh Paint with Water Coloring Book. It comes with a paintbrush but I gave him a Q-tip to use here just for a little something different.

   

Dude used a paper bag and yarn to make his own ark for Noah and the animals. You can read the details of that craft HERE. This lead to pretend play and story retelling with the popsicle stick puppets.

He played with his Travel Lite Brite.

   

He also made these yummy rainbow popsicles all by himself!

You can find the recipe and instructions for them HERE.

He did some fine motor skills work by clipping colored paper clips onto matching cards.

He made a fruit loop rainbow using the back page of our lapbook (link above).

   

He watercolored an R is for Racecar printout from Making Learning Fun and used markers to color an R is for Robot printout from Homeschool Creations. Both Red, of course!

We read the story of Noah quite a few times this week. And eventually pulled out our Noah sequencing cards. (link above) The first time we went through these I had Dude order them as I read the story, working on his listening skills. The next time I had him attempt to narrate the story while he sequenced them. He had a tough time with this, but did fairly well with some prodding. 

   

We did our tracing this week the same as last week. First I wrote the letter with a dry erase marker and had him erase it with his fingers a couple of times. When he said he was ready I let him take the marker and write the letter himself. This printout is from Tired, Need Sleep.

We also attempted something similar to a Montessori tracing technique I read about over at Montessori Tidbits. To do it I put one of each colored crayon in a bowl to Dude's left, an empty bowl on the right and an Rr outline printout in the middle. The idea was for him to trace the R with each crayon on the left then move that crayon to the right and continue with the next color. The result should be a rainbow colored R. Dude sort of did that. He didn't always finish the tracing before moving on to the next color. Oh well, he still got some practice and ended up with a colorful R!  

In an effort to take some of our school work outside we did a series of scavenger hunts to collect pieces for a rainbow collage. You can see more details about this activity and some unique places to hide your pieces  on THIS POST.

Using some applesauce containers and water with food coloring I set up a simple color mixing activity for Dude. I gave him the primary colors and let him use them to mix the secondary colors.

We talked about those results and used the color wheel and guess & check flaps I had made for the lapbook for review. (link above)

I drew out a simple graph and gave Dude a small amount of fruit loops to fill it.

We then used it to talk about counting, the concepts of more & less, and the basics of reading a bar graph.

In the picture he was telling me how many oranges we had.

For another outdoor activity we did a Rainbow Photo Scavenger Hunt. You can read the details on THIS POST. This was a huge hit and has actually already been repeated!

Dude colored the God Made Rainbows mini coloring book from his lapbook. (link above)

He also matched up his b&w color word cards to the tri-fold ROYGBIV sheet in our lapbook (link above). This is the first time I've had him try to match words and he caught on really quickly!

   

As one last, fun letter R activity I let Dude use tape to assemble this cute little rabbit toilet paper tube craft from DLTK-kids. I cut the pieces out and did some of the coloring for him. He struggled with the tape dispenser, but didn't want any help from Mama. He was very proud of the result!

 

Book picks for our Rainbow Unit Study:

 

 

Blog Note: We're on Facebook!

I'm just getting the page going over there, but I've already shared a couple of online freebies you don't want to miss!

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Rainbow Craft & Outdoor Activity

Over the course of the last week, we've been combining some outdoor fun & fine motor skills practice to come up with this crafty rainbow!

Here's how we made it:

   

First you'll need to get paint chips in each color you want on your rainbow.

Cut them into small pieces.

Now hide them for your child to find:

Maybe in a flower bed

Or in the pockets of a backpack

(all those zippers make for a great workout for strengthening little hand muscles and working on coordination)

Or outside

Or in a Sensory Bin

(This is our Bugs Sensory Bin for May, still going strong.)

Or around some favorite toys

Or in left over Easter eggs

(another great activity for little hands)

Or maybe all of the above!

(You could also sneak in some counting practice if you dare.)

   

After you find each of your colored treasures, let your child add them to a piece of paper with colored lines in the shape of a rainbow.

We did this over the course of several days, which worked great for my son because he never would have had the patience to make this collage in a single day.

Here's Dude's finished product. (sorry about all the glare)

You could also easily add some cotton balls for clouds, but this is going to be the cover for our Rainbows Lapbook so we choose not to.

Pretty cute, don't you think!

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