Planting a Rainbow by Lois Ehlert

My friend, Allison, from Train Up A Child Learn As We Go, posted about a virtual Book Club that she was participating in. I was curious, checked it out, and have decided that we are going to join in the fun. We'll see how I do with the Blog Hop part of the process, but doing activities centered around a book/author sounds like a lot of fun to me.

This month the featured author is Lois Ehlert. We chose Planting A Rainbow as our book. I brought the book home from the library not even thinking about what our week was going to look like. I thought I would just 'add it on' to our unit, turned out that this little book fit PERFECTLY with our science unit. I love it when things come together this way.

We read our book and talked about the flowers and colors as we read.

Our first project was to paint our rainbow garden. I gave the kids a couple pieces of green paper that they could cut and paste as stems for their flowers. 

Then I had the kids paint the flowers.

They had full creative freedom.

 

One of the projects from our core curriculum, Epi Kardia, was to paint terra cotta pots. I enjoyed watching how each kids paints differently. One 'dabbed' the paint and the other 'stroked' the paint onto the pot.

 I already had the idea that we would paint with fruit this week. The kids LOVED using the fruit. At first they were very skeptical, but when they picked up the fruit and saw the different patterns they were fascinated. I used an apple, lemon, lime, orange, and grape as our fruit stamps.

 

We used our newly painted terra cotta pots to plant a few seeds. We talked through each step of planting and growing flowers as we planted our seeds. The kids are excited to watch the flowers grow.

We planted Violas.

I googled the life-cycle of plants and found a picture that I liked. I made the template for for the order, but I had the kids paste the pictures as they thought they should go. Miss E did a great job with putting her flowers in order, starting from #1. Little man got the correct order, he just started in a different spot.

There you have it, the fun we had with Planting A Rainbow.
Elizabeth