Making Rainbows With Prisms

We began the morning with all kinds of little things in the Touch and Feel.  They were all different colors.  There were pipe cleaners, straws, pom poms, beads, and paper cutouts.  The kids immediately began stringing the beads on the pipe cleaners to make patterns.  They called out colors for the other children to find.  They love pretending to be the teacher!

The story was Pete the Cat, I Love My White Shoes by Eric Litwin.  This is a story about a cat who has brand new white shoes....that he loves!  He even sings a song about his shoes.  "I love my white shoes, I love my white shoes, I love my WHITE shoes".  But, then he steps in a big pile of strawberries.  His shoes, of course, turn red.  He has such a good attitude.....he just changes his song.  "I love my red shoes, I love my red shoes, I love my RED shoes".  The same thing happens when he steps in blueberries and in mud.  By then, the children had the hang of the story and we were all singing along.  When Pete steps in water, all the colors of his shoes fade away and they are white again.  But....WET.  New song.....and some squeaking as he walks home.

The language activity today was practicing using color words as adjectives in a sentence.  The kids all got black and white pictures to match to a colored circle on the board.  For example, there was grass to be matched on the green circle, and apples for the red circle.  Once they had determined the color of the pictures they needed to use the color word and the noun in a sentence to tell their friends.  "I have a red apple" or "I love the blue ocean".  Expanding sentence length and sentence complexity in a single activity.....all about colors!

We watched a Sid the Science Kid video about Prism Investigations then we headed outside to see if we could make a rainbow of our very own.  Ms. Sarah used a glass of water and some white paper in the bright sunlight to serve as our prism.  Once we got the sunlight just right, here was a tiny rainbow on the paper.  The kids loved it!  The named all the colors they could see and were not happy that some of them were blended together!  On the way back inside, Connor saw a rainbow on the floor where the sun was coming in the glass window.  We stopped and investigated that too.  Natural learning at it's best!

 

Rainbow art again today. We used all the mediums from the Touch and Feel and made a rainbow.  We talked about how not everything has indigo and violet.....so sometimes you just put those two colors together and use purple.  It took a little convincing that it was OK with "science" to do that, but we finally moved past it!

 

The kids have learned so much about rainbows this week!  They have been wonderful scientist and I can't even believe how much they have learned.