This is week three of a seven week unit on the colors of the rainbow, culminating in a “review week” where we talk about rainbows.
The purpose of this unit is to teach the colors, encourage recognition and differentiation of color, and to explain the reason we have rainbows.
Our Bible verse for the unit is Genesis 9:13, 15: “I set my [rain]bow in the cloud…I will remember.” We will be doing a lot of Noah’s ark discussion during this unit. We will also be working on a craft project throughout the unit that ties into the Noah’s ark theme.
Our color focus for the week was yellow.
Reading:
To start out the week, I went to the library and found as many books as I could that had a prominent use of the color yellow. I found one that became G’s favorite almost instantly. It is Emily’s Balloon by Komako Sakai. G calls it “Emmy’s boon.” The story is very basic: about a girl who gets a balloon one day and it becomes her friend. The illustrations are just wonderful and the simple prose leaves lots of room to fill in the narrative of the story with discussion.
Because this was her obvious favorite book for the week, I decided to make the story come to life by taking G to get a balloon (a yellow one) at the party store. We tied it to her finger (just like in the book). She was so happy and kept calling it “Emmy’s boon.” When we got home, she enjoyed making the balloon go out of her reach and asking us to get it for her (just like in the story). She loved it so much, she took it upstairs with her before nap time. Sadly, the balloon deflated very quickly; but G just kept on dragging it around with her! What fun!
Other favorite books for the week: Press Here by Herve Tullet, Little Chicken’s Big Day by Jerry Davis, and Chicken Bedtime is Really Early by Erica S. Perl.
Activities:
We also had a sensory bin for the week that included some rice, a flower sponge, a cup and bowl, a bowl with a whole in the bottom (sort of a funnel), foam puzzle pieces, and beads (all in shades of yellow).
G had lots of fun playing with this throughout the week and is working on keeping the mess contained a little bit! She enjoyed pretending she was going to eat the rice; although she remembered from last week that it really does not taste good because she would not put it in her mouth! The biggest hit of the bin was the bowls and cup. She spent much of the time transferring rice from one to the other and making it rain rice. It was so wonderful to see her work on the tasks of filling up and pouring out with such focus and intensity.
During the week, we ate bananas and banana bread. We also had most meals on yellow (bee) plates (from the Dollar Tree) and yellow bowls. We were going to try to make lemonade (like we did with the oranges), but I didn’t make it to the store to get lemons.
Arts & Crafts:
While Grandma and Papa were over last week, I left a giraffe craft for them to do together. This is part of an ongoing project for the colors of the rainbow that will get put together during our review week.
We took EVERY opportunity to talk about the color yellow last week and I think we made some progress on colors. She does have a little bit of trouble differentiating orange and yellow, but we will keep working on it.
We are having a great time with our unit on colors. We will be taking a short break for Valentine’s day, but then it is on to blue!
