rainy days and rainbows

It's been so long since I've posted an art activity. I had grand plans of posting one a week. Little good all that planning did. We still do many crafts and activities but I've been horrible about documenting them. I am vowing to make a better effort. I promise. We've had some nasty windy rainy weather the last several days and it was starting to get us down. But I decided if you can't beat 'em, join 'em and we had a grand old time with the following activity.

Any child old enough to color on a paper with markers can do this on his/her own. All you'll need is paper (we just used plain old white computer paper), markers and a rainy day. I also put laminated place mats under the pictures to make transporting them back inside easier. Otherwise you drip rainbow drips all through the house.

The kids colored a vibrant picture with the markers and then we put on raincoats, boots and umbrellas and headed out into the wet. We placed our pictures on a flat surface (we used a table) by the door and weighted it down with rocks. Did I mention it was windy? Then after playing in the rain for a bit, stopping many times to check on our pictures, we decided the rain had finished painting and we could bring them in. The kids thought this activity was magical. I'm not kidding you. They did this over and over and over. Each one must have gone home with half a dozen pictures. We experimented with leaving them out longer and shorter lengths of time to see the difference in the finished pictures. They also made pictures with lots of coloring and some with just a little bit of coloring. So not only is this a worthwhile art activity, they're getting plenty of math and science too. But don't do this because it's educational. Do this because your kids will LOVE it. Just be prepared to have a LOT of magnets to hold up all the pictures they make.



No rainstorm would be complete without a friendly rainbow so we made a few of those too. Again I was too lazy to document the process but here are the end results. The rainbow at the top is made from a coffee filter. We put food coloring and water into muffin cups and dipped the folded coffee filter into the different cups and let it dry. Easy peasy.

The second rainbow is made from Fruit Loops. The kids loved this one because we had to sort the Fruit Loops first and you can bet there was a lot of munching amidst all the sorting. Once the kids had the cereal sorted I gave each one a white construction paper precut rainbow shape and a bottle of glue. I first demonstrated how to make a line of glue near the top following the shape of the arch for the first color. After that the kids needed no more instruction. They were able to place cereal along the line of glue on their own and then continue on making lines of glue for the rest of the colors. This took a little longer to dry because of all the glue. And you might want to make sure if you're doing this with toddlers they don't try and eat any gluey cereal (I learned this the hard way).