A Rainbow Day

It was a while since we did any kind of “theme days” here, but last Wednesday I decided that we will have a rainbow day (or rather rainbow late afternoon) in honor of St Patrick’s Day. When I picked up Anna from school, we started with a rainbow snack from various fruits and followed with a science experiment. I first thought of doing a density rainbow, but decided in the end to do it when Anna is older and understands experiment better. So we just went with a colorful rainbow xylophone. Anna was delighted to mix food coloring and try different melodies on her xylophone. Then I invited her outside to paint a rainbow shamrock on the remaining paper heart dollies. By the way, Crayola watercolors are so much better than cheap variety. She really enjoyed trying different colors on her shamrocks and then was happily painting stones until I enticed her back inside with the promise of watching Sid the Science Kid. Of course, we watched the episode about Rainbows (we record Sid, so we can choose what we want to watch). They used prism in the episode to produce a rainbow, but we looked at the rainbow on CD surface instead. Then it was time for dinner. Dinner was rainbow toast inspired by Superheroes and Princesses. Anna absolutely loved it and ate two pieces.

Of course, the theme day would be incomplete without a book. We read The Rainbow and You by E.C. and R.R. Krupp. I really liked the illustrations in this book, and the story was really good for the first two thirds of the book, then it got too technical. Interestingly, both the book and Sid the Science Kid episode went with 7-color rainbow (“Russian rainbows” have 7 colors as well). Daughter chose to read the book many times since then, and I spied her writing ROY G BIV and drawing her own rainbows one day.