Summer 2021: Rainbow Week

 Week 1 of 8: Rainbow Week

Rainbow Breakfast Plate

This is a great way to ease into the summer because "Rainbow" is such a fun and easy theme to do. It's a great way to talk about colors and rainbow order with younger kids and the "science" of things like prisms and rainbow weather with older kids. Below were the activities we did, but this is one theme for which Google and Pinterest have millions of good ideas.

Destinations

Our main St. Louis destination this week was Faust Park and The Butterfly House. It was a busy but fun combination outing since there was both a great playground and two cool attractions. We picked up donuts with rainbow sprinkles from the store and did breakfast at the playground to beat the crowds and the heat. After an hour and a half of eating and play time, we went to The Butterfly House for a rainbow hunt. This was a great place to do this because between the butterflies and the beautiful orchids and other tropical flowers, it was easy to find every color in the rainbow. Here is a color checklist, because in my experience kids absolutely love to check things off a list.

While we were there, we also enjoyed a couple rides on the carousel which was a total bonus!

Alternate Destinations: If you already have other plans for The Butterfly House or if you want to go somewhere different, you could certainly have fun and successful color hunts at The Missouri Botanical Gardens, St. Louis Zoo, or Children's Museum.

Crafts & Activities

For our activities this week we made rainbow collages (I had saved some of the cardboard circles from frozen pizzas and these were SO cute to use for the rainbow shape... I also used up a lot of random craft stuff we had on hand - buttons, rhinestones, feathers, construction paper, stickers, etc. Typically your kids would actually put items down in rainbow ordered rows but mine just went nuts and I'm fine with it), had a rainbow splash party (using our backyard kiddie pool and a whole box of the "color your bath - bath bombs"), did rainbow manicures, and the kids' absolute favorite: Tie-Dye! I bought this kit on Amazon and I was SOOOO pleased with it. It provided plenty of dye for each of the kids to make two things and the colors turned out so much brighter and more vibrant than any of my childhood tie-dye efforts. I guess tie-dye technology has advanced... Haha.

 

Activities I had bookmarked but did not have time for included putting food coloring in water and turning white flowers into rainbow flowers, and sorting toys into different boxes/bins by color. I really wish we had time to do that last one because it would be a great way to make all the kids pick up a bunch of their tiny toys off the play room floor.

Edible Rainbows

There are so many fun rainbow food ideas that can be found. The three we did were Rainbow Fruity Pebbles Treats (none of my kids enjoyed eating these though... luckily my husband was up for the task), Rainbow Pizza (I used individual frozen cheese pizzas and added pepperoni, carrots, yellow bell pepper, pickles, purple basil, and olives... my pickiest child stuck with just pepperoni), Rainbow Pie (I used a cheap Jell-O no-bake cheesecake kit from Aldi and just sectioned the filling out into different bowls to add a variety of colors and then dumped them into the crumb crust - so easy!) and the all-around favorite was a Rainbow Breakfast. I don't have a link to a tutorial on that one, but I'd just say that it's red fruit (watermelon/strawberries), orange fruit (oranges/cantaloupe), yellow eggs (scrambled or hard boiled), green fruit (green grapes/kiwi), blue could be either blueberries or you could do what I did and dip some store-bought muffins into a little blue icing and sprinkle with blue sprinkles, and for purple you could do purple grapes or a little jelly on toast. For MY rainbow breakfast we were missing orange because I didn't want to buy anything extra just for the sake of one color. I pulled my rainbow breakfast together using things I already had on hand which was budget-friendly. You can see the picture of mine at the top of this blog post.

Side note: Rainbows are so popular and pervasive, I had no problem nabbing some very cute rainbow paper plates at Dollar Tree. This was great for our rainbow foods but also rainbow-ified our regular meals too.

One recipe idea I bookmarked but didn't end up doing was Rainbow Spaghetti which would work great if your kids don't get weirded out by colored pasta... I like that you could keep it simple with butter and cheese for pickier kids and your more adventurous eaters could add vegetables or grilled chicken.

Entertainment

We closed out Rainbow Week with a viewing of The Wizard of Oz. 

There are lots of other great shows and movies out there that you could use though. A little old-school Rainbow Brite or Care Bears would be fun if you could find it. Netflix also has a kids' show called "Rainbow Rangers" that my kids have since discovered and watched.

Rainbow Week was our first themed week of the summer and it is still one of my favorites. There are so many ideas that could work for this theme that we could totally do a Rainbow Week some other year and fill it with all new adventures.