Building a Rainbow

The felt rainbow activity was created as part of our Noah's Ark theme, but it could be used for any activity involving rainbows or a simple quiet time activity.  The appearance of the rainbow in the sky forms the climax of the Noah's Ark story as a reminder of God's promise not to flood the earth again. I wanted the boys to appreciate the different colours of the rainbow and the way in which one colour blends into the next.

I found an image of a rainbow on the internet and printed it out and then used it as a template for each section of the felt rainbow I was making. As red is the first colour in the rainbow, I drew around the whole template onto red felt and cut it out and then I cut off the red section of the rainbow on the paper.  Then I used the smaller paper template (minus the red section) and drew around it onto orange felt.  I cut it out.  Then I cut off the orange section of the rainbow on the paper and drew around it onto yellow felt and so on until I had all seven colours of the rainbow in felt in sizes relative to the order in which they appear with red being the largest and violet being the smallest.  I laid the different sections out on the table in front of Wugs and demonstrated how the rainbow would be built by placing one colour on top of the other.

By creating the activity in this way, it meant that if Wugs put the wrong colour first (for instance the violet before the red), he would know as the violet would be hidden by the red because it is smaller.
To make the activity more challenging, I printed out the names of the colours and asked Wugs to identify them with the colours of the rainbow.

What we used:
Different coloured felt
Scissors
Paper
Printer
Laminator

As this activity was too difficult for Dooey (2 years old), I brought out our wooden rainbow and mixed up the different sections of it for him to build just as Wugs had done with his felt rainbow. The only problem with this rainbow is the missing indigo colour, but it at least gave him an idea of the majority of the colours of the rainbow and the order in which they appear.

Please click here to see our other Noah's Ark-related activities.