Description:

Rainbows are a great way to teach children colour recognition, providing opportunities to learn more about primary and secondary colours and the colours of a rainbow. This activity helps to support hand eye coordination, fine motor skills, imagination, and creativity. It also helps to recognise and name colours, sorting and matching and working together.

Method:

1. To create a recycled rainbow collage, collect recyclable materials from around your home that could be used in the collage.
2. Supervise your child using a scissors to cut out pictures or shapes from the recycled materials.
3. Help them to arrange into the shape and colour sequence of a rainbow.

Promote learning by:

To help promote your children’s learning and development with this experience, you can ask questions about the colours they are choosing, where on the rainbow the colour should be positioned, what pictures have they cut out from the magazines, what shapes are they cutting the pictures out in, why have they chosen that picture or colour. You can further discuss about primary and secondary colours and how colours mix together to create new colours.

Extension:

This experience can be extended by asking children if they can match items from around their home and place on the coloured paper – for example matching red toys onto the red paper and counting how many red objects they can find around the house.