Letter R is for Rainbow

We have gotten really far behind on our letter of the week since just before Oliver was born. I realize we've had more important things to do, so I haven't been worrying about it. But this week I felt like we could give it a go. We did our letter R craft. I decided to do rainbows, because one of the boys was asking Aaron some questions about light and prisms the other day, so it seemed appropriate. :)

 I bought a cheap prism and let the kids play with it. The shined flashlights through it, used it to magnify things, and held it up to the window. Even though I was a little bit disappointed with the quality of rainbow this particular prism created, the kids had a blast with it, so I'll chalk it up to a success. I might even think about purchasing a little bit of a higher quality one.

We read the book All the Colors of the Rainbow by Allan Fowler. I actually wouldn't recommend this book. I thought it did a poor job of describing why rainbows are the way that they are. There were a lot of points that I had to have Aaron clarify for us later. BUT, this book did bring up the idea of the color wheel, and Lincoln got REALLY into it. I probably wouldn't have given the color wheel a passing glance, but Linc insisted that we make one, that it be able to spin, and that the colors on the one he made match the one out of the book exactly.

So we did. We strayed from rainbows a bit, but ended up talking about the color wheel, and how mixing certain colors together will make other colors. The kids also really liked the concept that white is made up of a mixture of all colors. (You can test this out by making a color wheel and then spinning it quickly, all the colors blur together and look white. It's really cool.)

Lincoln pretty much took the reins with this project, and I was very proud of him. He decided he wanted a color wheel that would spin, so it was his idea to use a brass fastener to hook the wheel (made out of a paper plate with the edges cut off) to a piece of card stock. He was also very particular about the order of the colors on the wheel, and the order of the colors in the rainbow he drew underneath his wheel. He had to make sure that red was on top and that violet was on the bottom, because that's how it goes in real rainbows.

Ivan was happy to follow Lincoln's lead. He wasn't as intense about it, but he did color his wheel to match Lincoln's. And he did come ask me how to spell color wheel because he wanted to write it on his paper. I am really pleased with how his hand writing is coming along. It's like one day it just clicked for him. He decided he wanted to write something and bam, suddenly his letters were legible and he was willingly making them correctly.

And Adelia, she was just happy to be participating. She was as proud of her color wheel as the boys were of theirs. :)

To finish up our letter R unit, we watched the Magic School Bus Makes a Rainbow episode.