Rainbow ideas for Half Term

Rainbow Playdoh

Use playdoh to spell your name, learn tricky words, write the alphabet, create monsters/aliens or make your favourite wild animal and all in rainbow colours. The possibilities are endless!

Coloured Rice Art

Dye different amounts of rice and combine with pasta, rice and lentils to create textured pictures. I use Splash food gels and Sugarflair pastes to colour the rice. I fill half a glass tumbler with rice and then fill water 3/4 of it with water. Finally, I mix a few drops of colour splash or a large teaspoon of paste and leave it overnight. In the morning, I spread the rice out onto kitchen roll and leave to dry. I often use rice that has expired. Coloured rice is also great for sensory play.

Rainbow Scavenger Hunt

Hunt for as many items as you can around the house and create all the colours of the rainbow!

Mr Frosty the Snowman Ice Crusher

There’s been lots of ice and snow recently so we had some fun mixing food colouring into the ice to create slush puppies and ice creams. We added a ice cream scoop and some plant pots for cones and it reminded us of Mr Frosty the Ice Maker!

Valentines, with love and toilet tubes

Simple activity using paint and left over toilet rolls. Mix glue into the paint to add extra sparkle.

Daffodil Science

St David’s Day is the 1st of March this year so why not have a go at changing the colours of your Daffodils for fun, it works! Just follow the instructions on this educational Science site.

Plant Flowers and watch them grow…

Buy different coloured hyacinth bulbs and mixed them up in a bag. Next, blindfold the children and ask them to guess what’s in the bag. Then, plant 3 bulbs each in 3 separate pots and display somewhere you can all watch them grow. Ask the children what colour they might be and if they can look after their plants (water, sunlight). My children can’t wait to see what colours emerge!

Ice Bird Feeders

There’s lots of lovely ideas on the internet for making Ice Bird Feeders to brighten up a dark grey day. We’re going to make one of these colourful feeders during half term, probably the rainbow one!

Rainbow Music

Have a go at filling 6 glasses with different amounts of water and use a teaspoon, fork or a toy beater to tap the glass to make your own Xylophone. The glass with the most water should make the lowest sound, and the glass with the least water should make the highest sound. We added food dyes to make it colourful but if you were really musical, the different colours could help with identifying different ‘notes’ and you could tell your child to tap different colours to make a song.

Rice Krispie Rainbow cakes

Follow BBC good food recipe which has lots of ideas for making rice krispie cakes more colourful!

How a rainbow is formed?

Why not try an experiment to find out how a rainbow is formed using a mirror in the glass of water.

Rainbow Smoothies

Follow recipes or just make your own! We challenged ourselves to make a different one each week in a different colour of the rainbow. Big bags of frozen fruit is not so costly and keeps fresh for longer.

Elmer the Elephant of course!

Draw Elmer onto an A3 piece of paper and cut lots of different coloured squares ready for sticking (card worked best). My daughter enjoyed painting glue onto each empty square before adding the coloured card to create a rainbow Elmer. This was a good independent activity.

Colourful Potions

My son had to write a Wizard’s potion as part of his school work so we decided to take it abit further and make it! We collected natural objects from the garden (mud, empty snail shells, coal, stones, herbs) and then mixed it all up with some crafty bits we had in the house (paint, glitter, googly eyes, sand and sequins). Soon we had a potion full of colourful wizardry wonders.

Rainbow Jelly

Everyone likes jelly! The best thing is it’s easy to make and it comes in soo many different colours! My son liked it so much he wrote a recipe booklet so he could make it again, again and again!