Noah's Ark Theme: Part 2

The Noah's Ark themed fun and learning continues here. As we explore the colors of the rainbow, I am strategically also placing in hands-on learning and experimenting with how primary colors mix into secondary colors. While we began our texture collage yesterday with the red and yellow sections, today we explored what happens when you mix red and yellow to create orange!

Today, I set out two pitchers of water, one dyed red, one dyed yellow.

We poured red water into the bottle until it was about half full and yellow to fill the other half. I sealed it tightly and then (mainly just for the fun of it) it was time to shake it up! Sure enough, we made orange! Adding color to water play activities with tools like measuring cups, empty containers, funnels and droppers is a great way to add some fun to this already wonderful sensory activity and experience color mixing. Since adding all of the colors at once generally results in brown here (an equally important educational experience though it may be), I usually provide two primary colors at a time. To extend this particular activity, I provided a bit of yellow and red paint at his easel for some color mixing process art.

What Goes Where in Noach's Teivah? In Noach's teivah (ark), there were three separate levels. Noach and his wife as well as his three sons and their wives all resided on the top. The animals all lived in the middle. The bottom level was reserved for food/garbage. Activities like this are a great way to introduce the important mathematical skills of sorting/categorizing and can also be a fabulous tool for teaching early spacial language skills--in this case, the concepts of top, middle, and bottom. 

We started by sorting plastic people, animals and food into their designated levels.

We repeated the same activity, now with pictures cut from old magazines of people, animals and food. Older children could participate in cutting out magazine pictures and if you also teach about the concept of garbage being stored on the bottom level, crumpled up pieces of tissue paper or scrap paper/newspaper could be used.

Now we have a wonderful visual reminder of today's activities! It's hanging at child-level for the artists' appreciation. 

My little one is loving this song about colors right now!