Category Archives: Rainbows

May9

Pom Pom Rainbow

Posted on May 9, 2014 by TodayWeDid

A is into rainbows at the moment.

Sorting pom poms.

I got out our tray of pom poms, which contains many pom poms in various sizes and colours. A first sorted through them to find the pom poms she wanted to use, placing them in piles of like colours. She chose to use six colours in her rainbow, and to place it on clouds. The clouds are made of cotton balls as A thought they were fluffier, and more cloud-like than the white pom poms we had.

Placing a line of pom poms.

A asked me to place a line of craft glue on her paper in the shape of a rainbow. She carefully placed the pom poms onto the line of glue, one at a time, making an arch in one colour. Then she worked on the next colour, and the next until she had her rainbow complete. Placing the pom poms using her pincer grip was good for her fine motor skills.

Sticking on the clouds.

Once all the pom poms were placed onto the paper, A put some glue at the bottom on each side of the rainbow. This is where she placed the cotton ball clouds. I thought it looked very good like this, but A decided that it needed some birds (some birds turned into a lot of birds!).

We have put this one up on our wall. It looks a little lonely at the moment, but we are planning to make some more rainbow pictures to go alongside it.

Rainbow picture with birds.

May3

Rainy Day Pictures

Posted on May 3, 2014 by TodayWeDid

Standard

While I was walking down one of the hallways at L’s school I spotted some wonderful rainy day art on the wall done by one of the classes. I liked them so much we tried them at home. At school they had used oil pastels and edicol dye, but we substituted watercolour paints, as we didn’t have the dye.

L drawing her picture.

First we drew a picture using the oil pastels. Most of the picture was drawn in white, including the clouds and raindrops. L put big bolts of lightning on her first one too. I also drew a picture and added a rainbow to it as an example for A of what we could do. A copied this picture, adding rainbows to her art.

Adding watercolours paint.

Once we finished drawing with the oil pastels, we used watercolour paint to cover the paper. The oil pastels resist the paint, so that only the blank paper is coloured, and the picture emerges clearly. I used black and blue for my clouds, light blue for the sky and light green for the hills. L made her first picture very blue with deep black clouds at the top. She also added some black in the background, giving her picture a cityscape look. She told me that the swirls at the bottom are from the drops of rain, but I think they look like scorch marks from her lightning. A had one picture copied from mine with black clouds, blue sky and green hills, but her other one was almost all blue. For this one she added some purple across the bottom, mixing it with the blue, and told me it was a river with lots of fish.

A’s second picture.

My rainy day painting.

L’s thunder storm.

A has a tendency to use a lot of paint in her art, and this left her paper quite wet and a bit soggy in places. Mine and L’s paintings dried quickly, but we had to wait a while for A’s. We have our rainy day pictures displayed on our living room wall.

Apr28

Tie Dye

Posted on April 28, 2014 by TodayWeDid

Standard

Mirrored fold.

We just had to try tie dyeing, it is so much fun, and it produces some beautifully unique and bright clothes. We used basic white cotton t-shirts and singlets for our tie dyeing, but it suits lots of other garments and cloth items too. I bought the tie dye kit from Educational Experience, as I wanted an all inclusive starter pack to help us get this fabulous activity right. This kit even came with a very handy DVD showing how to make some of the popular folds for tie dying.

L creating a swirl fold.

All tied up.

We washed our shirts, and then folded and tied them up in various ways while they were still damp. L was quite good at getting her shirts folded, A needed a little help, especially when placing the rubber bands around the fabric. They tried swirls, scrunches and concertina folds. I also helped A place one of her singlets into lots of little puffs of fabric each secured tightly by a rubber band. I also tied up some shirts. My favourite to do was making the swirl.

Soaking in the soda ash solution.

The shirts had to soak in soda ash solution for at least twenty minutes. We did this in one of our large nappy buckets (a clean one!). While they were soaking we got our dyeing area set up. We did it outside to minimise the potential for getting dye on anything that it wouldn’t come out of, like the carpet. I laid down a muck mat on the grass, and the kids wore old clothes and art smocks, as well as gloves to protect their hands. The kit came with dye applicator bottles that required the addition of water and vigourous shaking to make the dye usable, so I did this, and then we could start. There were three dyes, red, blue and yellow, but these were easy to mix to make sections of purple, green or orange.

L dyeing the end of her bull's eye short blue.

L dyeing the end of her bull’s eye shirt blue.

Excess soda ash solution was squeezed out of each shirt as we removed it from the soaking bucket. Then it was ready for the dye to be applied. The kids enjoyed putting the dye onto their shirts in various colour combinations. It was very messy though, and even with the protective clothing, both kids had splashes of dye on their skin. A kept touching her face, resulting in numerous dye splotches on her forehead and cheeks, and L splattered some blue dye onto her legs. It didn’t wash off our skin with the first wash, but it was mostly gone by the following day.

Dyeing a swirly shirt.

Some dye ran off onto the plastic muck mat, so we opted to place our shirts onto cake cooling racks to help reduce the run-off dye from getting on the fabric where we didn’t want it. We also wiped down the mat with paper towel and washed dye off our hands in between shirts. When each shirt was finished receiving dye, it was placed into a plastic zip-lock bag to rest for about 24 hours.

After waiting a whole day, I rinsed the shirts out, removing excess dye. I removed all the rubber bands, and rinsed them some more, and then washed all of them in a regular wash. The first round of rinse water from the machine was still pretty blue, but it ran clear after that. I hung all the shirts up to dry. It was a spectacular row of colour hanging on my line. All the patterns came out wonderfully and the kids are so happy with them.

Spirals.

Scrunch pattern shirts.

L’s bull’s eye.

This is A's singlet that had all the little tufts of fabric caught in rubber bands. The whitish circles is where the rubber bands were.

This is A’s singlet that had all the little tufts of fabric caught in rubber bands. The whitish circles are where the rubber bands were.

The left singlet was folded in quarters and the right was vertically concertina folded.

Mar23

Coloured Rice for Sensory Play

Posted on March 23, 2014 by TodayWeDid

Standard

L’s school has been running a ‘paint and play’ or ‘stay and play’ program on a Friday morning for a while now. And we like to go along and enjoy it. There is usually some art and/or craft activities, toys, music, books, and sensory play. L liked in when she was still in preschool, and would probably still like to come to it if she didn’t have to be in class instead 🙂 I’ve been taking A regularly and she has made friends with some of the other kids that come regularly too. It is mostly other families that have older kids at the school. It is nice and easy to take L to class and then read books or do puzzles in the library until it’s time to gather under the trees at the front of the school for a play.

One of the sensory play items they sometimes have out is a huge tub of rainbow coloured rice. A loves it. A few times we’ve been, that is the only thing she has played with the entire time. She loves to run her fingers through it, pour it into different containers, spoon it around, put play animals in it, tell the other children it is hers and they can’t play with it…

I’d been thinking for a while that I should find out how to colour rice and make some for home, so I finally did. Turns out it’s pretty easy to do (thanks Powerful Mothering for showing me how!) A little bit of white vinegar mixed with food colouring in a ziploc sandwich bag made it super easy. I used about a cup of rice for each colour until I ran out of rice. A helped by putting the rice into the cup measure for me. I wish I’d taken a photo of the kids mixing the colour through the rice in the bag. They really liked squishing it around and shaking it to get the colour on all of the rice. The colour would have been more vibrant had we used white rice, but we had some old brown rice in the cupboard that we weren’t going to eat, so we put it to good use. I think the colour still took fairly well, though the red and pink look rather similar.

Coloured rice drying.

The rice needed some time to dry so I spread it out on baking trays. I popped it in the oven on low

Coloured rice drying in the oven on low.

with the door propped open for a little while to speed up the drying time, since it’s still so cold here I thought it would take ages to completely dry, and I couldn’t put it outside in the sun as it was too windy. It didn’t take too long to dry like this, though the kids asked when it would be ready several dozen times.

Ready to play with.

The kids started out with one colour each, but predictably, that didn’t last long, and we soon had rainbow rice. They also wanted a little bit more, so we added some plain white rice to the mix as well.

Feeling the rice.

Mixing the colours together.

They ran their hands through it, put their feet in it, mixed it with whisks and spoons, measured it, put it in sieves and poured it through funnels. They really enjoyed the feel of the rice.

Feeling the rice with their feet.

Sifting the rice through a slotted spoon.

A’s pet store.

L made her tub into a Chinese Restaurant, while A opened a pet store in her tub. A offered snakes, frogs, lizards, bugs, a polar bear and a camel for sale. She charged Big L $28 for a couple of lizards. L made us entrees of spring rolls and prawn crackers, mains of rainbow pork, and dessert of deep fried ice cream. She used the sieve to deep fry the ice cream, and some containers became the stove where she cooked the pork.

Making deep fried ice cream.

We had a wonderful time playing with the coloured rice. Not only was it a good sensory play activity, it also inspired some beautiful pretend play. I love watching the kids bringing their imaginations to life during pretend play, and it’s even better if I’m allowed to play too!

I have stored the rice in an airtight container for more play later, and the kids have asked that I make some more colours to add to the tub for next time.

Update March 29 2014:

Colouring the rice yellow.

I made two new batches of coloured rice today using white rice. The colours are much more vibrant, and I’m very happy with them. The kids wanted yellow, and I made some more red. It was sunny and calm today too, so I was able to put the trays outside to dry. It took much less time than our earlier batches. Once it was all dry, I mixed the new colours in with the others. The kids are very happy with their rainbow rice.