Share the Sweetness

Spring is finally here! How does one get her Toddlers excited about Spring? Or even teach them what Spring is for that matter? With a Rainbow! Rainbows are the answer, my friends! Weather, Rain, Leprechauns, and the beautiful colors deliver a perfect game plan for Toddler Education in the golden paper! When it comes to teaching my Toddlers about a Rainbow, I must confess, we had a LOT of fun these past few weeks learning all we could {handle}!

Teaching Toddlers about the Rainbow

Our adventure began with a need for introducing Wyatt {Hooligan #2, 1 Year Old} to colors. Cash {Hooligan #1, 2.5 years of age} also needed a mini unit for Toddler School that would transition us into our next big Toddler School unit about Gardening… With the weather unpredictable in true Oregon Spring tradition, I decided the weather and Rainbows were the perfect topics.

Teaching Toddlers the Rainbow developed into our February/March transition mini unit. When planning a mini unit I find it easiest to guide us through with a fun Reading List of picture books that are also educational. Some of these I already had at home, others I bought on Amazon and I found the rest at our local library {which I highly recommend supporting in your local town!}

Are you a Stayton Family? Head on over to the Library today and get your Library Card! You can even check out movies and bring your kids over to Thumpin Thursday! Cash will be there to cook you dinner in the play kitchen 🙂

Toddler School Rainbow Mini Unit: Reading List

All of these books were perfect levels for Cash (2.5) and he learned a great deal from each. I was actually surprised at how much scientific information he retained from the Rainbows Never End book! This is the only one I would have considered a little too advanced for him, but it is actually written very well for his age.

We read that book nearly every day throughout the unit (about 3 weeks) before we did anything educational related to Rainbow Lessons. We then used the book, A Surprise for Tiny Mouse as a bedtime story for fun. {Spoiler Alert: the surprise she gets is a RAINBOW!}

The other books were used as instructional and inspirational for their own lessons.

How I plan my Units

With all the units I build, I develop a plan that focuses on my “Magic 7” Instructional Methods. Children learn in a variety of ways. You actually never know which Instructional Method might stick for them as it relates to the content. Therefore, I know that for a solid, well rounded educational collection of lessons I need to cover multiple variations of the same educational goal (Rainbows). My “Magic 7” Instructional Methods are areas of Differentiated Instruction. Sometimes I double up, sometimes I embellish and go crazy with the arts & crafts. Regardless, these are the seven methods I always teach with…

Magic 7 Development Goals

Sensory Play x 2
Discovery Learning {Science}
Math Concepts
Toddlers in the Kitchen
Fine Motor Development
Gross Motor Development
Arts & Crafts

A tour through our Rainbow Unit

Sensory Play-Rainbow Rice: Our adventure begins with Rainbow Rice and some pretty awesome sensory play. Cash surprised me with his idea to sort the rice by color into our book… This activity alone is still Cash’s all time favorite Mess Mat Lesson! You can read our full adventure HERE and even learn to make your own Rainbow Rice {super easy} HERE. If you don’t have time to make your own, you can also get some in my Etsy Shop HERE.

Discovery Learning- Indoor Rainbows: February is a pretty yucky month in Oregon, so the opportunities to get outside are rare. I wanted to emphasize the science behind Rainbows, which we learned in the Rainbows Never End book, so I took to making Rainbows inside. We have this great place in our house where the sun shines through in the mornings against a wall. Armed with a beach towel and spray bottle we made our own little rainbows inside and Cash did see ONE, once!

Math Concepts: Rainbows actually make perfect topics for some fun math lessons on counting and patterns. We took to The Mess Mat every morning with some sort of Rainbow project. We sorted our toys into Rainbows. See our Instagram video HERE

I saved egg cartons and we used them to build rainbows out of pom-poms.

We threaded some “Rainbow Beads” (aka Fruit Loops) and repeated patterns

We got a little sassy with it too!

Fruit Loop Rainbows weren’t the only colorful breakfast food either… in fact we spent most of our morning breakfast times talking about colors and rainbows. We tackled one of our Toddler Behavioral issues (not eating) with Rainbow Smoothies!

Toddlers in the Kitchen- Rainbow Smoothies: Math, fractions and even blending colors came in to play with these Toddlers in the Kitchen recipes. Read our full adventure HERE

Sensory Play- Tapioca Pearls: These gooey little darlings arrived and I was quite excited to try them! I have seen Tapioca Pearls all over the internet as a taste-safe sensory play activity and I just had to see for myself! Read our full adventure from The Mess Mat HERE

Fine Motor Development- Sticker Names: Throughout every unit there is an underlying theme of letter recognition for Toddlers. I found this fantastic {Free!} font that is just the right size for these mini stickers. I happen to have a whole bunch lying around from my Kindergarten days! This time I gave him the Rainbow stickers and Wyatt got big spot stickers too! Read all about the fonts I used HERE

Gross Motor Fun- Rainbow Wrestling: For some reason I always come back to write my posts and discover that my Gross Motor Lessons also tend to include TEXTURE play! I don’t know why that happens, but here we are again! This go around we wrestled Rainbows {my boys are pretty big on wrestling} and tangled ourselves up in colors. Read all about that ~~exhaustion~~ experience HERE

Arts & Crafts- Easel Painting: Cash hadn’t spent much time on the new easel so we really focused on that for this unit. It is hard to break out the paints with Wyatt around… he’s sort of a thrower… and a tearer, and a destructionist…. SO during his naptime Cash and I would paint rainbows. Cash would also paint what he saw outside that day! This picture he is painting the brown falling maple seeds that we saw while in the garden! We even used celery to blend colors and stamp flowers for Mother’s Day. {Shhhh… Don’t tell the grandmas!}

That concludes our Rainbow Adventure. If you are about to embark on your own Toddler School Rainbow Lesson or even Mini Unit I hope I can give you a fun inspiration or at least an awesome book to read! I really enjoyed this mini-unit as it was a perfect transition into Spring. We are all informed about weather and now when the sun finally shines we’ll know where to look for our Rainbow! We’re also primed for St Patrick’s Day now! See…. Great timing!

If you’re looking for some more inspirational blog posts to read while you’re preparing for Spring, this post just so happens to be a part of a Blog Hop for one of my favorite Facebook Blogging Groups: Blogging & Business: Moms Who Do It All.

Find more inspirations from my fellow Mommy Bloggers below! Thank you for reading!

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Welcome to Mom School! This post is one of many Homeschool Preschool Lessons with #MySweetandSticky {Cash & Wyatt} As a former educator, I wanted to give them their best start before heading into public schools. (Which we LOVE!) On occasion, and throughout the summer, we continue our At-Home Learning. Cash is my Science Guy and Wyatt can’t get enough Sensory Play. Join us for every Sweet & Sticky moment.

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