March is the perfect time for a rainbow theme in preschool, whether it is to compliment St. Patrick’s Day or go alongside your weather theme. Not only will a rainbow theme enhance color recognition and introduce different concepts of science and weather, rainbow themes are so fun and pretty!!
Whenever I introduce a new theme, I like to make sure there are LOTS of theme related books available in our playroom for my preschoolers to access. I use our local library to gather some ahead of time and I also have a seasonal book rotation for our home library. For this week, I gathered books specifically about rainbows as well as books that focus on color. Today we read A Rainbow of My Own, Elmer and the Rainbow as well as Planting a Rainbow.
Our first rainbow activity was so easy to prep because it involved items that I already had in the house. Ahead of time, I gathered up small toys of every color. You can choose to have your preschoolers help you with this process too by going on a color hunt. Then I prepared the outline of a rainbow on a large sheet of white paper.
Emmett and I took turns rolling a colored dice and placing a corresponding item on the rainbow. Emmett enjoyed arranging his toys according to their color. Once we had one color “win,” we decided to take turns choosing our own color toy to add.
Emmett was impressed with how it all came together. A rainbow made out of toys!
If you have colored letters or numbers, you can reuse this rainbow outline and add a literacy or numeracy twist. These colorful alphabet erasers are from the Target Dollar spot from a while back, but I was able to find them available online. My two year old, Lillian, loves naming letters so this activity was perfect for her.
Our next rainbow activity was a fun SNACK-tivity. I gathered Fruit Loops, jumbo marshmallows, and pipe cleaners and placed them all in a deep tray.
I encouraged the kiddos to string the Fruit Loops along the pipe cleaners to make a rainbow. Then we added jumbo marshmallows to the ends for the clouds. My five year old, Emmett, was really into making his rainbows look authentic. When he was finished, he proudly displayed his creations in his bedroom. Lillian, on the other hand, needed a little more direction and her activity became a snack a lot sooner!
In the end, we ended up with four delicious rainbows. This was a fun way to encourage fine motor development, hand-eye coordination, color recognition and patterning.
Who doesn’t love directed drawings?? Once we were finished with our snack-tivity, I guided Emmett through a rainbow directed drawing. I taught him how to make clouds with “humps” and then we went through the colors of the rainbow together to make the rainbow bands. While I think this drawing could be complete as an outline, Emmett wanted to color it in. My original plan was to paint the rainbow bands with our fingerprints, but Emmett was not crazy about that idea.
Of course, I let him decide how he wanted to color in his rainbow. He chose to fill in the colors with a good old fashioned paintbrush. He had so much fun, carefully managing his brush strokes. He decided to add a sun, a storm cloud and rain to go along with his rainbow as well. We will be sure to hang this one up!
At the end of our morning, I decided to reinforce color words with these fun picture and word color puzzles. These puzzles are part of a larger set of activities that I created for my Planting a Rainbow Book Companion. (Link below!)
There’s just something about vertical work that draws my preschoolers in. So I added magnets to the back of these puzzle pieces and left them all mixed up on the magnetic whiteboard. You may or may not want to offer all the puzzle pieces at once to your preschoolers. I knew Emmett would be up for the challenge because he is my puzzle guy.
Emmett worked one color at a time to construct the puzzles for each color. He got a little mixed up with the word “purple” and needed some assistance. Other than that, he was able to put them together independently and really enjoyed seeing the words associated with each color. I recently started working with him on CVC words, so he was excited when he put together the word “red.” He actually recognized each sound and blended them together. He was so proud of himself!
Here’s a sneak peek at some of the other fun preschool activities that I created to compliment Planting a Rainbow, by Lois Ehlert.
If you are interested in more rainbow and color ideas for early learners, be sure to check out these resources from my shop…
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Mrs Mama Bird 