Maybe your kids have just finished playing around with prisms or maybe they’ve spotted a rainbow after a spring shower and now you’re looking for a fun way to get all your kids involved in a bit of color theory without actually using the word “theory”. It’s a beautiful day and everything is in full bloom. It’s time for a Backyard Rainbow Hunt!
Backyard Rainbow Hunt
This activity will earn big smiles from all the kids. The rules are super simple: one petal of each flower or leaf to show the color, look for as many rainbow colors as they could find, bonus points if they find more than one thing of each color and bring them all back to the table as fast as they can when the timer goes off. Set a timer for ten to fifteen minutes. You may need to walk around with them to help reach leaves and blossoms too high for them to safely reach.
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Prepare beforehand by drawing a rainbow arch on a poster board. Get your kids to write ROY G BIV on the appropriate stripe and color each stripe to match.
Our Friend Roy G Biv
You are sure to have at least one child who is confused about indigo. That’s great because it means they are thinking about it and are curious. Some things for them to notice as they are gathering their bits of the rainbow are how many different variations of a color there are in your yard? Is grass the same color green as the cedar tree or the palm leaf? How about blue? Are they able to find a true crayon blue flower? Maybe not. I live in Texas where bluebonnets bloom in the Spring. Even though you’d think with that name they would be BLUE, really they are a slightly purplish-blue. And what about pink? What? There’s no pink stripe on the rainbow!? That’s because pink is a mix of red and white. So put those pink petals on the red stripe! But back to that troublesome indigo color. If you want to make indigo with a paint set you’d mix two drops of blue with one drop of red. If you want to make violet you’d mix equal parts blue and red. Try and see what you get. Which one is bluer and which is redder? Did you know what we call certain colors has changed over the centuries? Way back in Sir Isaac Newton’s day (the guy who in 1666 came up with the color wheel when he was studying prisms) what they called “blue” would today likely be called aqua and the confusing indigo color would probably be called blue today Some people actually want to remove indigo from the color wheel because it’s so confusing! What do you think about that? What would happen to our friend Roy G. Biv?
Remember not everything has to be “natural” during some seasons certain colors may be really difficult to find so a small toy, glove or piece of paper may fill in for these colors.
When the timer rings everyone races back with all parts of the rainbow they collected and dumps them on the poster. They can be organized first by color, but what then? Maybe they will want to organize the items in each stripe by size or by who collected them. This is the time to talk about all the shades and tints of the same color. A shade is the dark version of the color that you get by adding black or brown to it. A tint is the light version of the color you get from adding white, pink for example is red plus white.
Overall, in the quick fifteen minutes or so it will take to search for colors and organize them, they will all be able to create a pretty darn beautiful rainbow–just from things in their backyard.
They get to practice all their great sorting, grouping and organizing skills and have a blast doing it! This fun little activity reinforces all that plus encouraging them to stop and look around at their own regular everyday world and playground with a different set of eyes–scientist eyes, artist eyes, detective eyes.
They will really enjoy it.
And with a little bit of learning disguised as a game–and very little prep and clean-up–the parents will surely enjoy it, too.
I think it was Family Fun magazine that had something similar many years back. Only they used an egg carton and had the kids paint the inside of each compartment of the egg carton a different color. Then as you and your child went on a walk, they could match the colors and collect items from nature to put in their egg carton container. It was one of my children’s favorite things to bring in their nature backpacks.