To brighten up a day, make a rainbow come your way! This colour sorting activity and rainbow collage will make even a grey, rainy day seem bright. Practice colour recognition and sorting as well as using paint and paste.
Time: 10 minute activity, 10 minutes painting, 15 minutes pasting
Age: Under 5's
Level: Easy
Materials
Variety of items the colours of the rainbow (beads, paper, fabric and felt pieces, buttons, feathers, images from old birthday cards)
Paper for painting - we used a piece about 40 cm by 50 cm cut from a craft roll.
Red, yellow, blue and white paint
Discuss what colours are in the rainbow and collect a variety of items to be spread out on a white towel or sheet. We gathered anything that we could stick to a sheet of paper. Prepare the 6 or 7 containers. We ended up using just 6 as purple and violet were put into the same container.
Our rainbow items scattered on white towels.
Identify which container will be for each colour and begin sorting. Preschoolers can be left on their own to do this and toddlers can practice colour recognition.
Prepare the painting sheet by drawing lines to seperate the rainbow.
If you only use red, yellow and blue, talk about where the other colours will come from and introduce the concept of colour mixing. My toddler painted free hand on her own sheet while my preschooler and I painted the rainbows.
After the paint dries, dump one bucket at a time out and paste the items on the rainbow.
Close up of our collage items.
