Chasing Butterflies Daily

Our primary school kid is getting daily tasks sent to her online from her teacher. One of yesterday's tasks was to make a rainbow to stick in one of our windows. Lots of kids all over the country have been doing it in an attempt to cheer up passers by. I've seen some fantastic drawings as well as a beautiful version where people have cut out lots of hearts in the different colours of the rainbow and then stuck them up in arches in their windows. I decided we should try something a little different as well. We had already done an activity with paper plates earlier in the day (we'd made colour wheels that spun to show white while discussing primary and secondary colours) so it's hardly surprising that my inspiration took me back in that direction again. I got the kids to colour in both sides of 8 plates ( pink, red, orange, yellow, green, light blue, dark blue & purple ). Then I drew spirals on them to make it easier for them to cut the right shape....

When I was in pre-school in Sweden I remember we had a set of boards that were designed to practice threading and tying laces, I think there possibly were ones with buttons and zips as well. Now our girls have already mastered buttons and zips, they have plenty on their clothes. But, as is the case for many kids these days, they don't really have to deal with laces as most kids shoes either have velcro or elastics. It's still an important skill to master though. I could set them loose on the adult shoes with laces in the house but I liked the larger size of the boards I learnt on as a kid so decided we'd try to make something similar at home. It's handy with the projects that keep the kids busy through different phases, especially when you've literally got nothing but time to kill like most of us do in these covid times. The girls have yet to actually master the tying of the bow but they enjoyed the process of making their boards and threading their ribbons...

So I saw someone else on one of the FB family lockdown pages share this idea and I loved it. Our theme for the time being is looking at colours and light/dark. Partly because I love colours, but also because we've felt inspired by the fab GALT Rainbow Lab activities I posted about on my instagram account recently . This rainbow activity is great fun and uses multiple skills while occupying a fair bit of time. We spent most of the morning doing this.  First step tip out ALL your toys on the floor (admittedly we skipped most of the stuffed toys because it got pretty crowded with four bodies plus the sea of toys). I didn't tell the kids what the end aim of our activity was. Then divide the toys into groups depending on their colour. We used our toy boxes to keep them together as the toddler was pretty adamant he was going to mix things up again. As we worked our way through the toys we talked about what colour they were and what those colours are in English, ...