Today’s rainbow sensory collage explores tactile sensations, loose materials, cutting, and fine motor.  Our colorful sensory activity for preschoolers is easy to set-up and encourages self-exploration.  Last week we kicked off our St. Patrick’s Day crafts for kids with green shamrock foam dough.

Materials:

• Rainbow Printable Portrait or Rainbow Printable Landscape
• Paper
• Glue
• Kid Scissors
• Objects in various textures and shapes in red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, white (clouds)

For the purposes of teaching a child, I left out the indigo.  Ironically, C comes home from preschool and says, “Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet … those are the colors of the rainbow!” “Hey! Where’s the indigo Mommy?”  That will teach me, right?!

Have your child collect objects in various textures, sizes, shapes, in the 7 colors [minus indigo + white for clouds] of the rainbow.  After going on a sensory exploration, he chose pom-poms, beads, tissue paper, popsicle sticks, colored goggle-eyes, buttons, felt, string, sequins, tool, recycled colored pasta, and beaded necklaces.  Once he chose his loose materials, I arranged them inside a wooden tray by color order.

C started with the red, moving the sensory materials all around, then adding glue.  He really enjoyed our heart sensory collage activity, so I thought he’d enjoy a rainbow collage. You could always just explore the loose material and discuss colors too, instead of gluing.

Once he realized there were beads, he immediately stopped and proceeded to cut the beads! Bead activities are great for cutting practice andboosting fine motor skills.  We scored an 8-pack of colored beads from the Dollar Store.  Now is a great time to stock up with Mardi Gras this month.

Easy rainbow crafts for kids, right? He continued to add different materials and identify the colors of the rainbow.  We also discussed textures and sizes of the materials. How do they differ? Are they soft? What shapes and colors do you see? Is this bigger and smaller?

As a final touch, we added white party bag filler for the clouds.  He wanted the color names visible, but you could fill the entire rainbow as well.

This invitation to create with sensory materials is engaging and explores simple play based learning.  Looking for more sensory crafts and activities?

Here’s a few of our favorite spring activities:

Melting Insect Sensory Painting

Easy Memory Match Coin Game for Kids

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