Rainbow Projects for Kids

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Spring is around the corner! And with it comes spring showers, right?
Well, in honor of the coming rain, I’m sharing some rainbow projects with y’all today! Because, who doesn’t love rainbows? Right?
These projects are also slightly inspired by St. Patrick’s Day, you know, leprechauns and pots of gold at the end of rainbows.,.it’s a stretch, but I’m rollin’ with it 😉
I’ve got a fun science project for ya AND an art project. Ready? Let’s do it!
Rainbow Art
We have a monthly homeschool art class at our local library. And we missed it last month because we were out of town. But I did hear about what they did and knew I had to try it. And when I thought about rainbow inspired projects, it just clicked!
This art technique uses oil pastels and oil. I think that at the library they did mineral oil or baby oil, but since I didn’t have either on hand, I decided to just go with some coconut oil I had in the pantry. It worked out pretty well!

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So first I grabbed my oooollld set of oil pastels – if you are like me and have a 20-year-old set of oil pastels, I highly recommend buying new ones 😉 And then I took some art paper and drew a rainbow. I took this opportunity to talk with the girls about the different colors that were in the rainbow and the order they are in (and thoroughly confused them when I used pink in place of red since I didn’t have a red oil pastel…another good reason to have purchased a new set!)
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I drew each arch with a little space in between and then used a q-tip and some coconut oil to blend the colors together a bit. And then the girls made their own rainbows.

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It turned out pretty nice – even with ancient oil pastels 😉

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Rainbow Science
Next, I had to break out one of my favorite little science projects from childhood. White carnations in colored water. It’s a classic and I just had to – besides, my husband had never done this, can you believe that?!

I took this opportunity to talk about primary colors and how to make secondary colors. I used red, yellow, and blue food coloring to color the water in three jars.

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And then I poured some of the red water in an empty jar and then added yellow to it, showing the girls how it makes orange. I did this with blue and yellow to make green (this got the biggest reaction from them!) and with blue and red to make purple (which turned out to be far darker than I had anticipated!).

Next, we took 6 white carnations stems, I cut fresh ends on them, and we placed them in the water. I asked them what they thought would happen to the flowers…my 5 year old quickly said she thought they would die…and I guess that’s a reasonable expectation!

Rainbow Collage
After just 24 hours, we started seeing the petals change color,

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This is what they looked like after 4 days,
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The girls thought all this was very exciting! After all, this was way better than the flowers dying!

We found these two rainbow projects to be a fun educational way to start welcoming spring and rain showers and rainbows after winter! I hope you and your littles will too! If you do either of these projects please share them with us on Instagram!

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lindseyLindsey is a modern homesteader and homeschooling Mama of two. Together with her family she lives in North Florida on 1/3 of an acre where they garden, raise chickens and turkeys, do lots of DIY, make a ton from scratch – and include natural learning experiences along the way.

 

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