Who doesn’t love rainbows?! It’s been so fun to add some colorful activities during the cold and overcast month of January! My students have LOVED these hands-on learning activities and the bright colors help to make learning fun and exciting. These activities can be used while studying weather, colors, light, and even during letter “R” week! Each activity helps to promote growth in different areas of early childhood development.
1. Rainbow Bulletin Board Paper Fine Motor Activity
This activity promotes growth in hand-eye coordination, hand muscle strength, use of pincer grasp, color recognition, and sorting skills. Plus, it’s so much fun! Snag these rainbow-colored dot stickers from Amazon and draw rainbows on bulletin board paper on the tables. The children can then match up each color to make colorful dot rainbows! You can also add have the students count how many dots each color has, there are so many possibilities when doing this activity in your classroom or home.
2. Rainbow Water Beads Sensory Activities
Run, don’t walk, over to Amazon and pick up this water beads set! Young children (and adults) love these beads and the toys included helps to strengthen fine motor skills and provide an exciting sensory activity. It is also fun to put them in bottles for mesmerizing sensory bottles for your home or classroom.
*Disclaimer: Please make sure that you are purchasing non-toxic water beads and putting them out of reach of young children.
3. Rainbow Alphabet Matching Puzzle Cards
We are working on upper case letter recognition and beginning letter sounds in our classroom and we love practicing these skills with games, puzzles, and other hands-on learning activities. These rainbow matching cards help to support young learners because they provide pictures to help the child to be successful in matching the puzzles. There are two versions included in this resource, upper/upper case puzzles and upper/lower case puzzles. Find these in my Teachers Pay Teachers store through the link below!
Rainbow Alphabet Matching Puzzle Cards
4. Skittles Rainbow Experiment
I love to amaze my young students with fun science experiments! They love Skittles and were so excited to see what was going to happen when we poured water in the dish. All you do is line the Skittles up in a circle in a plate or dish and pour enough water to cover the bottom of the dish, but not too much. Then you have fun watching the rainbow slowly appear in the dish! This is also a lesson in self-control and patience as you have to watch for a couple of minutes to see the rainbow appear and the dish needs to stay still.
5. Rainbow Sand Writing With FREE Alphabet Cards
Sand “writing” is a great pre-writing activity for young learners that combines sensory stimulation, kinesthetic learning, and visuals to provide a rich learning experience. For this activity, I used black craft sand and poured it over laminated rainbow stripe paper. When the students make the letter with their finger, it reveals the rainbow underneath! These cards can also be laminated and used as tracing cards with dry-erase markers. Get them for FREE in the link below!
6. Rainbow Fine Motor Mats
Fine motor mats are great for laminating for tracing or putting objects on like playdoh, mini erasers, pom poms, etc. Fine motor mats can be used during literacy centers, morning work, and independent work.
7. Skittles Math Activities FREEBIE
Have some math fun with these Skittles activity sheet FREEBIES! The set includes sorting by color, graphing, and patterning.
Happy Teaching!
