Rainbow Mop Painting

I've been wanting to post this for ages but we lost the lead to the phone the photos were taken with! It was found this morning so here we go......

I stumbled across this activity here whilst we were learning about rainbows and just had to try it out with James and Charlie.

I bought a cheap sponge mop and poured paint into a tray in stripes. We just dipped it in and pushed it along lining paper.

They both gave it a really good go once they realised what we were doing.

Then I encouraged feet to go in the paint and walk along the paper. Even Dad tried this!

It all got a bit messy......

I think we all really enjoyed this one!

Messy Rainbow Painting

Hands always find their way into our painting activities but was planned for with this one....

We squirted the paint directly out of the bottles onto a large piece of lining paper using 'hand over hand' to make a big rainbow. I left a brush next to it and encouraged both brushing the paint and pushing hands through it.  Needless to say, the hands won!

Weaving a Rainbow

We made this out of a left over bit of garden trellis and strips of coloured fabric. We were a bit low on purple and had no orange at all but I think it was still quite effective.  Also, I tried to have several different types of fabric in order to give the boys a more interesting tactile experience and let them hold and investigate the strips they liked for a while.

The boys took part well.  Charlie needed quite a bit of help but pulled the fabric through on his own.  I used a lot of repetitive language like, 'Down, Up, Pull!' to try and get him to understand what we were trying to do.  James needed less help and once he saw what we were doing managed to do the weaving bits himself whilst I just had to tuck the ends in.

Update: 

Granny read this and came over with some purple!

Bendy Twisty Sensory Rainbows

We made these with jumbo pipe cleaners stuck into play dough.

These were made out of bendy wax sticks.  They were too small for the boys to deal with so I gave them some to hold and do there own thing with whilst I made them some rainbows which I stuck into shaving foam 'clouds'.

I had a very hard time trying to get James not to eat the shaving foam!

Rainbow Waffles

I found a new blog this week with a lot of rainbow activities for us to try, http://shareandremember.blogspot.com/search/label/rainbow. I'm sure we will try some more of the things here but the activities that really spoke to me were the rainbow circles,

and the rainbow waffles!

Last year I made a rainbow birthday cake for James and Charlie's 8th birthday so I had all the food colourings in the cupboard.  I also have a circular waffle iron so it just had to be done really! Yesterday seemed a good day to do this as Gaby was home (strike day) and I new she'd want to join in. She helped me make the waffles and then we all sat down to eat them...

James was not terribly keen....

...but Charlie finished them all off!!

Rainbow Sand

A few things we've done with our rainbow sand....

Flowery Rainbow Activity

Our local park is full of colour at the moment so it occurred to me whilst I was walking the dog there yesterday that we could go and look at the flowers, talk about the colours and take some pictures to make a rainbow!  We took A LOT of photos.  We got some of every colour although we did have to search quite hard for blue!

I cut the flowers out and then today we stuck them onto one big rainbow.  

Rainbows

Yay! Finally able to get back on here.....

We are doing a whole load of rainbow stuff at the moment.  I've made some toys (not the windmill!) which loosely relate to the rainbow theme to have around the place for the boys to investigate.

They've been well played with already, so I will probably make some more bits and bobs to go with them.





Dinosaur Play Mat

Yes, another dinosaur thing! I've been making this play mat which I saw here whilst searching for dinosaur activities.  I decided to embroider mine (a bit!) and have cut out some felt dinosaurs to use with it instead of toys.  I think the dinosaurs could be nicer with a bit of stitching too but if I didn't get on with it we would have finished learning about dinosaurs before it was ready! We plan to use it as a prop for a counting rhyme - something about '5 Scary Dinosaurs....' I expect.  I've backed it with some board we had left over from our radiator covers so it could be put on the wall.

More Dinosaur Stuff - Banner, Foam Model and taking them out for a walk.

My laminator is my best friend. Paper does not always lead to happy activities in our house as one child likes to eat it and the other likes to rip it up!  For this banner I cut the dinosaurs out of coloured paper and wrote a letter on each one (spelling dinosaur) and laminated most of them first.  I left three for colouring and once done, I laminated those too! We decorated the others with coloured sticky dots and pegs for spikes.  I got the clothes peg idea from No Time For Flash Cards.

James then threaded them all onto a length of wool, ready to be hung up.

Without stating the obvious too much here, we were able to cover a lot of things with this activity - colours, counting (pegs and dinosaurs), bit of literacy, fine motor skills, mark making and creative stuff - it worked well for us.

Also this week we found some great dinosaur stuff in The Works clearance sale - a puppet which Charlie is very taken with and is helping us with our songs, a jelly mould (I am collecting far to many of these!) and a foam model which I decided to give a try as it was half price. I did the model with James as he is quite good at getting the concept of putting things 'on' and he did really well with it.  We've had some window coverings put up recently so we have been able to put the model on James' windowsill for him to see. This is great, as usually we have to put anything that can be damaged or sabotaged out of sight. 

We took our dinosaurs for a walk on the beach this week too!  They made some lovely footprints in the sand....

.....I keep wondering if anyone found them?!

Decopatch Dinosaur

I am totally guilty of underestimating my children! My mum bought them some models to decorate with Decopatch papers and I really didn't think they would manage very long sat doing it, so I decided just to do one dinosaur with them as it tied in with our theme. I planned for them to do one side each, a bit at a time over a few days. 

I was very wrong! Charlie repeatedly singed 'more' to keep going and finished his side all in one go and James was just fantastic doing his side, he even said 'brush' in the end for brushing on the glue, and he sat for about half an hour until he'd finished the lot!