Learning as we grow: Rainbow week all wrapped up

Well here we are at the end of Rainbow week part 2. I find that two weeks for each theme seems to be working out best. We tend to have some days where we don't work on our theme at all, because we are just too busy. We had doctor appointments, school, play dates, and activities all week, so finding time to do our theme work isn't always easy. Plus Keira is going through some major clingy phase right now, and it sure makes it hard to get things done. But we do the best we can, and did manage to get a few more projects done.

In Alli news she is still a little resistant at first with the hearing aides, but the good news is I can put them in both ears now, and she will wear them! It helps a lot if she is distracted of course, and there are still times she rips them out pretty quickly. But we have had many long periods of her wearing them, so I am hopeful once again. Plus yesterday while watching signing time, she was really interested in doing the signs, and trying to say some of the words. Yay Alli!!

Update: I had this post all written out with pictures and captions etc Unfortunately somehow my computer shut down and didn't save any of it. So I'm attempting to rewrite this post. But I'm so frustrated because I had written so much and it was such a long post. Anyway, let's try this again...

Our first activity was creating a rainbow, while learning about color mixing. Emily added blue, red and yellow to the water with uncolored water in between.

Then we rolled up a paper towel like a snake, and draped it in all the cups. Eventually the colors start creeping up and into the uncolored water making orange and green.

We read a book on how rainbows are made while we waited.

And, It worked!!

Alli actually joined us so I gave her a do a dot page to do. She only used one color lol!

It didn't take long for her to get bored, so I gave her the Elmer activity again. I think she glued maybe pieces of paper on, then spent the rest of the time gluing her fingers together.

I tried this shape activity with her, but she either wasn't interested or it was too difficult. I think she can do it, because she can match just fine, so matching shapes shouldn't be too hard I wouldn't think. She still has glue on her hands, and you can see she is still messing with that. She was too fixated on that glue.

Meanwhile...

Looks like it's break time!

So the girls went to bed, and I took the opportunity to set up another experiment. This one takes awhile so I wanted to get a head start. The celery is supposed to take on the color of the water it is in. It's pretty cool. The blue and green did the best. Red and orange were weak and muddy looking and so was purple actually. Yellow didn't really show. :)

While the celery was cooking, Emily appeared. She was in bed, but apparently Alli had escaped. I heard Alli in the living room, but thought Matt had let her out, thinking there was no way she would sleep. Apparently Emily told Matt she was just going to go get Allison and bring her back to bed, but instead she saw me in the kitchen and asked to do an activity. Well thinking she was out legitimately I said yes. Come to find out later when Matt came out looking for them, that that wasn't the case. Whoops! Anyway we ended up doing this pipe cleaner noodle color matching rainbow activity.

Once the noodles were on the pipe cleaners she made a rainbow

Then Alli showed up, and started to put noodles on the pipe cleaners too

"Look mom, it's a purse!"

The noodles were soon abandoned, and she started to try and put the pipe cleaners in the Styrofoam. It was a little hard for her, they kept bending.

I love that concentration face!

She was getting frustrated, so I gave her some colored craft sticks instead and that worked much better.

Emily decided to add on to her rainbow, with flower noodles.

The next day we did some colored ice and salt. I gave them the colors, a paintbrush and a syringe. Alli painted a little bit, but mostly made a mess with the paints.

Emily was pretty interested but she really only wanted to use yellow her current favorite color. I kept trying to get her to try mixing the blue and yellow to make green but she wasn't too interested.