This is week six 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.
This week the focus was purple. We did lots of activities and read books to emphasize the color.
Reading:
Our main book for the week was “Harold and the Purple Crayon.” This was a brand new book for G, but she loved it almost immediately. When Harold falls off the other side of the mountain, she says, “Oh, no!” and when he goes to bed, she says, “Night, night, Harold.” She is very invested in Harold’s safety and sleep. We also continued to use other books we have to reinforce color awareness by pointing out and focusing on their use of the color purple.
Activities:
I didn’t get around to making purple rice for G this week, so we had a purple activity bin instead of a sensory bin. The best thing in it was the microphone. It is one of those amplification microphones (I am not sure how they work) and she LOVED singing her alphabet into it. She has almost got the whole alphabet down, she just misses X every time. She also likes to drop the microphone on the ground just after completing the song, as if she has just completed a rap battle in which she is the obvious winner. The bin also included purple puzzle pieces, connectors, beads, pom-pom, and bracelets.
We had some fun with stickers this week. I took a page of smiley face stickers and asked G to pick out the purple stickers, peel them and put them on a piece of purple construction paper. She was able to do this very well and enjoyed it immensely. She was proud of her work and often pointed out the other colored ones and said the appropriate names. We hung the sticker page up on her chalk board for her to look at all week.
Arts & Crafts:
We took out the paints again this week and did something I have been seeing everywhere online, but I have never done before (I NEVER took an art class in school): relief painting. I realize I am way behind the times on this one, but really this is so neat! We took a large piece of paper and wrote out G’s name in tape strips. Then we worked on painting the paper with a silicone brush and an open weave sponge. She loved painting and LOVED when we took of the tape to reveal her name. We are slowly teaching her the letters of her name and I think she is starting to recognize all the letters.
We also continued our colored animals series and made a purple snail. This reinforced color and shape recognition.
Out & About:
G loves to put on head bands and hats (I think it stems back to this activity) and she loves glasses of all kinds. So when I found these (in purple!) at Target (in the Dollar Spot), I just had to get them for our purple week. She loved putting them on throughout the week and this is my favorite snapshot of her with them:
We had such a good time with purple this week and I am so excited about our upcoming review week: rainbows!
