One of my story time themes last summer was Rainbows. I chose three books from our school library and planned a variety of activities. My story time was open to PreK – entering second grade kiddos and lasted 90 minutes. I had mostly kinder kids attend. We read A Rainbow of my Own by Don Freeman, All the Colors of the Rainbow by Allan Fowler, and Brown Bear, Brown Bear by Bill Martin. One of the resources I found which helped in the planning of this event was the Rainbow Science plan by Tracie Williams.
I had a variety of activities which we moved through as the kids were ready to move on.
I created a grid format and cut tiles of a variety of shapes
and colors. I gave the kiddos the grid and a pile of tiles – their job was to sort them either by color and by shape and glue them to the grid.
I also found some Brown Bear Brown Bear coloring pages which worked as a time filler after they finished the grid activity (or if they were too young to be able to figure out the activity).
For the next activity, I purchased spray bottles from the Dollar Store, Styrofoam plates, a bag of baking soda, a bottle of vinegar and food coloring. I put vinegar in three spray bottles and added yellow, blue, or red food coloring. I piled some baking soda on the plates and gave the kiddos the spray bottles and let them experiment with mixing the colors.
We also played a Brown Bear Brown Bear matching game. This game required some adult help. Some of the tiles had the color words (written in the color) but since my attendees were not yet reading, I helped them. The older ones caught on but my youngest attendee got frustrated with the game.
I did another science experiment with them involving Skittles. If you place Skittles around the edge of a plate and pour water in the middle, when the water reaches the Skittles it will start dissolving the Skittles and form a cool rainbow.
The final activity was to create Rainbow Shakers. I modified this pattern some. We used whole paper plates, folded them in half and put dried beans in them to make shakers. A volunteer and I handled this part of the craft as we didn’t want the kiddos using the staplers. After this step was completed, the students glued cotton balls on the plate along with colored streamers.
We had a lot of fun with this story time and the kiddos had some things to take home when they were finished.
Books used in this story time
A Rainbow of My Own
All the Colors of the Rainbow (Rookie Read-About Science (Paperback))
Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?
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