Rainbow Art

It is raining in California! Finally! Last week I saw a beautiful double rainbow and I felt inspired.  So I decided to do some art.

The students in my class are 7 and 8 years old. That means that the kids in my class have rarely experienced true rainy days due to the drought. So, with the fabled El Nino hitting, I decided to have a little fun with the rain.  (Better than complaining about Rainy Day Recess...though trust me...It has not been fun.)

I pulled out all the markers I had been hoarding storing and had the kids work with their seat partners to find a red, orange, yellow, green, blue, an purple one. They needed to find the ones that said "Washable" or the older ones that said nothing. The new ones say, "Ultra Washable." I found that those ones did not work as well for this project.

I gave them each a small piece of Water Color Paper. Our were 6 x 9in. They then colored a rainbow on the paper. My example look like this:

So all of theirs looked like this:

11 years and I always forget to have lots of different examples. Learn from my mistake and have a couple of examples that look different.

Have the kids put a lot of ink on the paper.

Then, we put them out in the rain. The kids thought I was nuts! Lucky, they are kind of used to it and don't question me too much when I'm crazy.

We waited about 5 minutes and then we went to get them. I told them they could tip them if they wished. Some asked to leave them out longer.

This is the end result. Painting with the rain is pretty awesome.

Then, I gave them choices. They could write a narrative, an opinion, or do some research on rainbows. The only requirement is that rainbows be highlighted somehow.

I love reading their creativity. One write about a rainbow that pukes all the colors that are in the world. One wrote about the Aurora Borealis  Get a copy of the rainbow writing paper here.