St Swithun’s Day (15 July 2008)
7 Jul 2008
Explore colour change outdoors on a rainy St Swithun’s Day
Splash and splosh
Creative Development
Exploring Media and Materials
Development matters: explore colour and begin to differentiate between colours (30-50 months); explore what happens when they mix colours (40-60+ months).
Early learning goal: explore colour, texture, shape, form and space in two or three dimensions.
What you need
Group size: small group.
Rainy day; waterproof outdoor clothing; boots; sheets of thin paper; paint; jugs; droppers; watering can.
What to do
Tell the children that some people believe that if it rains on St Swithun’s Day (15 July 2008), it will rain for the next 40 days and 40 nights.
Invite the children to you would like them to try some colour mixing, using raindrops instead of a paintbrush, to celebrate St Swithun’s Day.
Home links
Encourage parents to explore colour-mixing at home with their children by making ice lollies using different-coloured fruit juices.
Further ideas
With parental permission, take the children to a DIY store to collect colour charts. Back at the setting, cut them out and create colour-mixing card games, for example, matching red and yellow with orange.
Encourage the children to mix their own colours for a particular purpose, for example, to create a pattern of green and purple stripes.
Invite the children to put on waterproof clothing and boots and go outdoors into the rain. Take plenty of paper, jugs of red, yellow and blue paint and droppers for the paint.
Demonstrate to the children how to dip a different dropper into each jug to draw up some paint, drop a blob of each colour on to a sheet of paper and then hold the paper flat until several raindrops are running along the top. Watch as the paint runs and the colours merge. (If it is not raining, pour water from a watering can, high enough to produce some imaginary rain.)
Top tip
Drop two paint blobs of each of the different primary colours into transparent beakers. Label each beaker, for example, ‘red and blue’. Leave the beakers outside to see what colour the rain becomes when it mixes with the paint in the beakers.
Bring the paintings inside. When they are dry, discuss the different colour changes that have occured.
Support
Arrange a table outdoors for the children to put their paper on to paint blobs of two colours using paintbrushes instead of droppers.
Extension
Invite the children to sprinkle coloured powder paint on to paper before holding it up in the rain.
