St. Patrick's Day Rainbows

03/15/2013

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Preschool painting color mixing giant rainbow
     Color, color, color!  The two weeks leading up to St. Patrick's Day were filled with all the colors of the rainbow around here.  We did lots of painting and color mixing (I provided only the primary colors and we discovered what happens when they mix together!) to make a giant rainbow, in hopes that it might bring a leprechaun to hide his gold here!
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And it worked!  :)  We had a mischievous leprechaun stop by and turn our milk green, and he even turned the toilet water green!  He also left us some fun surprises: a "pot of rainbow" and some green glow bracelets!  He left a note, so we learned that his name is Sneaky O'Malley!
Baking Soda and Vinegar with Jello and painting
We had lots of other color fun too, like our baking soda and vinegar play, with red jell-o powder added in.  An idea that came from Footsteps In Growing Daycare that we had a lot of fun with.  When the kids were all done playing with the bubbling reaction, we used the resulting mush to paint with.  It left an interesting textured product that smelled wonderful! :)
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     We also had fun with flubber, and a new-to-us sensory material: Rainbow dough.  We have made cloud dough before -- it consists of flour and baby oil.  Since the only moisture comes from the oil, when we added colors one at a time, they didn't mix together but stayed separate as we played to become rainbow dough!  It is shown here after we had only added green, but Play Counts has some fun pictures of the dough with all colors added.
Preschool rainbows




     We had fun with rainbow strips of paper available in the art area all week,
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...and our new rainbow sensory bottles!   We also learned a couple of new songs that you may have been hearing at home!  If not, ask the kids to sing you the Rainbow song, or the Leprechaun song that they learned!
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We even got to EAT a rainbow with these colorful rainbow fruit kabobs and explore new and fun green foods, like avocado. 
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We worked together to build a tape rainbow and then used it as the base for our rainbow color scavenger hunt!  Some of the kids are really getting good at ripping tape off the rolls....such HARD work for little fingers!  But they are very motivated to learn how, so they work, work, work at it!
     We had so much fun learning and playing with colors!
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Red for our Rainbow

03/05/2013

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     In anticipation of St. Patrick's Day, we have begun talking about leprechauns and rainbows and have decided to try to gather as much rainbow color as we can over the next two weeks so that maybe a leprechaun will come here to hide or find his gold! :)  We have started with the color red, so today the kids really wanted to make RED flubber (they like to call it "slime").  We added in some pieces of red yarn and some cups and spoons and the kids spent the better part of the morning building a wide variety of "leprechaun traps" as they told stories of what they would like to do if they ever meet a leprechaun. :)
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Happy birthday, Dr. Seuss!

03/02/2013

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     We had so much fun last week celebrating Dr. Seuss's birthday!  For the past couple of years, I think it has been the favorite "holiday" around here!  This year I brought out some old favorites (like painting with our feet, and then reading the Foot Book) as well as some new activities, art projects, and fun foods.  The kids had fun using tissue paper scraps to fill in their Red fish & Blue fish,  and loved dipping cotton balls into colored water to make colorful Truffula tree-tops!
     In addition to the fun art projects, we enjoyed some great Dr. Seuss themed games and activities, too.  The kids did some impressive building and patterning with our new Cat In the Hat foam stacking blocks, sharpened their fine-motor skills with some Tuffula tree beading, and even got to Hop on Pop!
     Of course we can't celebrate Dr. Seuss without having some Green Eggs & Ham, but we also had fun with lots of other Dr. Seuss themed meals and snacks.  One of their favorites was the fish cracker graphing along with some Pink Ink Drink (also from One fish, Two fish, Red fish, Blue fish).  We had colorful Lorax pasta with broccoli and asparagus "trees" and a blue alfredo river, played with Brown Bar-ba-loot bears and built our own Truffula trees (from the Lorax) using pretzel sticks and mini colored marshmallows, and at the suggestion of one of the kids, we even had a birthday cake for Dr. Seuss!
     We enjoyed celebrating Dr. Seuss once again and are now looking forward to lots of rainbow fun in the next couple of weeks, building up to St. Patrick's Day!
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