Rainbow Lesson for Preschool

A few friends and I all have kids the same age, and we take turns hosting preschool once a month for our toddlers. My lesson this month was on rainbows. Here are some of the activities we did:

Rainbow Cookie Playdough

seen on The Crafty Crow here, who got it from Plum Pudding here, who got the recipe from Allrecipes here (phew!)
The kids had a great time with this, and when they were tired of playing with the dough, I divided their creations into cookie-sized pieces and baked them. They got to eat one at snack time with a big bowl of rainbow fruit salad, and then took the rest home. They actually were pretty tasty.


Rainbow Collages

I divided each 8.5x11" paper into 7 equal stripes using a Sharpie, then colored the first inch of each stripe with a crayon, in rainbow order, of course. My idea was to give each kid a magazine, a paper, and a glue stick and have them tear colors out of the magazines and glue them in the correct stripe. They didn't quite grasp the tearing out part, so I sat with them, tore colors out of the magazines, and passed the pieces around. They did a pretty decent job of gluing the colors in the right stripe on their paper.

Primary Color Water Activity

This was a cinch and they loved it! I took three clear plastic containers and filled them with an inch of water. I used liquid food coloring to make one red, one yellow, and one blue. We happened to have 3 kids so it was perfect. Each child took a color and we had fun mixing them in other clear plastic containers. It was so simple, I couldn't believe how much fun they had with it. We talked about each new color before we mixed the primary colors together, and the little tots were giddy as orange, purple, and green appeared. Then we put them all in rainbow order on the table and oohed and aahed over them. Finally, they had fun mixing all the colors together to get brown. It was great!


Colors of the Rainbow Song with Actions
to the tune of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star
Red, Orange, Yellow, Green and Blue,
Indigo and Violet too.
Take the colors one by one, mix them up with rain and sun.
Stand on tip-toes way up high, paint your rainbow across the sky!

Books we Read
Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister
My Many Colored Days by Dr. Seuss
Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? by Bill Martin Jr.

Other Fun Things We Didn't Have Time For
Rainbow Spin Art
Fruit Loop Necklaces
Rain Art (it wasn't raining today, sadly)
Pipe Cleaner and Pony Bead Rainbows