R is for Rainbows

This morning we hosted our bi-monthly letter of the week playdate. If you have been following my blog, you know that some weeks we do a simple story and a letter to hang on the fridge. Other weeks we do a fun craft. This was a craft week! I had several fun rainbow activities to go with our letter R theme for the day.

We read the story Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister.

We did a rainbow craft I saw over on somebody's Montessori blog, please help me if you know where - I forgot to bookmark it, and I can't find it now!
Basically, you cut styrofoam balls in half and stick different colored pipe cleaners in them. Then you thread on beads of the same color to each pipe cleaner. Bend the pipe cleaners in an arc and stick the other end into the other half of the styrofoam ball. I ended up hot-gluing the styrofoam halves to a paper plate, so they would keep their arcs. This is a wonderful exercise for color matching as well as working on those fine motor skills! And the beauty of pipe cleaners and styrofoam is that you can take them out and do it over and over again!

We mixed secondary colors with ice cubes, as seen on Monkeyin' Around.

I put too much color in my ice cubes, and had to fill the jars up the rest of the way with water so we could really see the new color, they were just too dark, other wise. I would advise using only a couple of drops of food coloring for each ice cube.

We ate letter R snacks, like ravioli, raisins, roast beef, and reeses pieces.

And we played with our rainbow rice sensory box, always a hit. And I have pictures to prove that you CAN have 5 kids all playing at once and very little mess to clean up. Putting a tarp down first did help . . . but the kids were really, really good!

We had a fun and busy morning, and now E is passed out in her room and I am ready for some well deserved quiet reading time!