Rainbows are beautiful and magical and where unicorns live. I want a unicorn. Therefore I want to be a rainbow. But we all know that can’t happen so instead I’ll teach about them in my class! I did rainbows week many years ago and loved it so I knew I had to bring our rainbow week back! Rainbows are a great kick off to spring and they tie in perfectly with a unit on weather! And seriously, who doesn’t love a good rainbow?
For our rainbow week we used our Rainbow Research Project!
This creation contains everything you need for your rainbow research project in color and blackline! Also includes math and literacy centers and suggested books to read!
As with all of our research projects we kick off with our schema map and a hat!
The shcema maps astart off empty and we add our Schema or what we know about rainbows. Then as we learn about rainbows we add new leanring and we address any misconceptions!
To make the hats, I cut strips of paper 1.5 inches wide. STudents use their pencil to curl the strips and glue the strips onto sentence strips. When we finish we staple the sentence strips to fit our heads! Now we have rainbow hair!
The class also does a tree map for what rainbows have, need and what rainbows are.
One of the final things we do as part of our Rainbow week is a true false sort. These true false sorts add some higher order thinking to our learning and they provide opportunities for great conversations!
Of course we are introduced to ROY G BIV to learn the colors or the rainbow! We make a ROY G BIV portrait! And to add some silliness and fun to rainbow week we get to wear a rainbow wig and take pictures!
We also label rainbows!
The highlight of our rainbow week was our walking rainbows science experiment! This one had the ‘staches oohing and aahing for days!
Here’s how this works:
You need 6 cups. 3 of the cups need water and 3 remain empty.
Students roll up 6 pieces of paper towels to make little paper towel tubes.
In the cups with water add red, blue and yellow food coloring.
Place the paper towels so they feed from one cup to the next. Make sure to arrange the cups in this order: RED, empty, YELLOW, empty, BLUE, empty. What will happen is that the water will “walk” on the towels. So the red water will walk into the empty up and mix with the yellow water to make orange! This experiment takes several hours to several days! We started this on a Friday around noon and by the end of the day we could see some colors moving and mixing! When we returned on Monday the rainbow was in full view and it was amazing!
The end result is beautiful!
Rainbow Week Art Ideas
Marshmallow rainbows painting! Click the picture to see the post about this fun painting project!
Fruit Loop rainbows! Give students a rainbow template and they glue on Fruit Loops to make a rainbow! Add cotton balls for clouds!
Torn paper rainbows! The class works together to tear construction paper to make a large rainbow!
Painting rainbows! Students paint the rainbow, cut it out and glue it on black paper. Then add strips of paper or streamers to make a rainbow!
Rainbow Snack
This is a fun snack! Use food coloring to make colored milk. Students use paintbrushes to paint on bread. Toast the bread! RAINBOW TOAST!
Freebies
For some freebies and more ideas, check out this post!
At the end of our rainbow research project, I was so impressed with how much we learned about rainbows! We became experts on the topic and we now fully understand why we can’t find a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow!
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