Monday, April 21, 2008

Somewhere over the rainbow...

Since we exploded our volcanoes on Tuesday, instead of waiting until the end of the week. Then on Thursday we learned all about the weather and even got to see a demonstration of the water cycle in action. I was feeling a little lost about what to do on Friday. Finally late on Thursday after hearing, "Somewhere Over the Rainbow", I decided rainbows would be the perfect way to end the week. After all rainbows are beautiful, colorful, and a combination of natural phenomenon and weather....what could be better?

So we started off with an estimating activity. The first cup had 20 rainbow-colored Skittles, the last had 80...so the kids were supposed to use the information they were given and try to estimate how many were in the middle glass.

What is your guess? (I'll have the answer in the comment section.)

Then I showed the kids this photo from our trip to the National Zoo last summer (with my sister AnnaLisa). They were completely fascinated by this point and then we did a tally graph to find out how many of them had ever seen a real rainbow. Five of the kids said they had and three said they had not.


Thank goodness for a beautiful sunny April day, because then we headed outside to make our own rainbows! Using these little plastic prisms (from Michael's) the sunlight reflected tiny little rainbows onto their papers. If you click on the above picture you'll be able to see it in much greater detail, and then you should be able to see how perfect those tiny little rainbows really were.

Then using our little mirrors, a bowl of water, and our papers we were able to hold the mirror in the water and reflect wavy, moving rainbows onto our papers. It was a little tricky to get just the right angle, but it was ever so exciting when the rainbow appeared!


Then it was off to make our Fruit Loop rainbows while we listened to some fun rainbow songs from the computer! We talked a lot about the order of the colors in the rainbow and more about how they are formed.

Definitely another fun day in preschool! (Don't forget to check the comments to see how close your guess was.)

2 comments:

Lara said...

There were 48 Skittles in the middle jar. Emi was our closest guesser with an original guess of 50 which she then changed to 49.

How close were you?

Deanne said...

What a fun day! I guessed 50. Emi still beat me. =) What did she win?