I introduce a weather unit around the time of St. Patrick’s Day so we can do some rainbow science activities along with learning about the water cycle, wind, rain, and clouds too. Here is a good utube video to introduce kids to the spectrum.
Rainbow IDEAS
Mosaic rainbow- Children glue paper squares on to rainbow pattern. Then add some cotton ball clouds to the top. Or have kids paint hand prints in all of the colors and in a shape of the rainbow for a giant classroom rainbow.
We also made pots of gold with rainbows attached made with just 1 inch x 10 inch strips of the 6 colors. We put puts of gold (black pots with yellow colored coins….see picture below)
Or just cut out white paper clouds (picture below) and add streamers in the 6 colors of the rainbow (I combine indigo and violet into one color of purple). Go out and check the wind direction by how your streamers blow.
Every year during our rainbow sciene and St. Patricks Day activities we write about “A Person I Treasure” and it goes on some paper I found with a treasure chest on the top. We add sequins and little gems and metallic mosaic paper tiles to the top. And the rainbow art goes to the side of our writing on a cute bulletin board. The kids write about pets, parents, grandparents and siblings and best friends. It is a touching bulletin board.
MATH
Another individual and fun math activity is graphing the marshmallow shapes that come in the Lucky Charms cereal. I give each student a little cup of cereal and they graph their shapes on the worksheet. A link to make a copy is HERE. It is from Tooter4kids. I added some math to the page such as add up the horseshoe and heart shapes. Or subtract the least number of shapes you have from the greatest number of shapes. The kids learn the math vocabulary better the more we use it. Are any of your shapes equal in number?
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| Graphing with Lucky Charms Marshmallow shapes. |
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| Lucky Charms Math ……always fun! |
RAINBOW SCIENCE
I love to have the kids learn about Roy G. Biv (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet) and the order of the rainbow colors. We look at some glass prisms on the overhead that show rainbows in a cool way.
Make some 3D “Rainbow” glasses. Use cardboard shapes of glasses. I had some I just copied onto card stock. Then give kids some red and blue permanent markers and have them color an “eye” shape that will fit over the glasses out of overhead clear acetate, 1 in blue and 1 in red. Then cut them out and tape them inside the glasses. If you need a tutorial I found one HERE. I’ve bought many 3D books over the years so it’s fun to make these glasses.
RAINBOW SCIENCE EXPERIMENT
Another fun science I do is use my beakers and do some “color change” science. A fun experiment is using a bowl of milk and dropping 2 blobs of food coloring into the bowl in 4 different colors. Then take a tiny speck of Dawn dish washing liquid on the end of a toothpick and stick it on the edge of the milk. It should show a fizzy chemical change. Then dot another far corner of the milk. Don’t dot right into the food coloring.
Do it a few more times. You should have about 5 minutes of fizz in the experiment. It’s really cool, easy, and cheap.
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| This is after about about 5 minutes and a few kids had bumped the bowl… |
It will start a chemical reaction that will “fizz” the milk. It’s really a cool rainbow affect. The kids want to go nuts with the toothpick but don’t let them or it ruins the effect. A tiny bit goes a long way and will make the reaction last longer if you stick it in one area of the bowl each minute and then watch and wait. It’s very cool!
See my post on hurricanes and tornadoes and another post on clouds.