The Red Shed - All About Rainbows

These posts document my teaching adventures in starting up a Reggio-inspired school in my farm shed in January 2023. I’ll share more about how all this came about soon, but in the mean time, I hope you enjoy these moments & learnings.

This week was filled with colourful sensory play, lots of paint (and mess!!!) and most importantly (at least for me and my view of education!) accidental learning through purposeful play.

I set up our sensory table (I had one custom made by Cob&Pickle in Howick…click here for a link to their Facebook page) and put some laminated rainbow images into the trays. I covered these with beans and rice and then let the children ‘dig for the rainbow treasure’. This was such a hit! I used some of the left over rainbow rice I made a good couple of years ago (yes, I am as shocked as you that that batch of rainbow rice is still going strong!). I love the photo of the kids looking underneath the tubs to see the rainbow (make sure to print and laminate it double sided so that it actually shows up nicely both from the top and the bottom).

I bought one of these lovely wooden rainbow stackers from Thornwood Treasures a few years ago for my kids, and it was the perfect open ended toy to bring out for this week. The kids had a lot of fun with them, using them in all sorts of ways…it really is a fantastic toy!

For ‘writing practice’ (I don’t believe in anything too formal in the early years) I use a big white board with lots of different sensory letters for the children to touch and trace. Then they get to have a go at writing the letter themselves with a white board marker. I always start this exercise at snack time (or while they are busy with playdough/plasticine), by reading the corresponding Letterland story that goes along with each letter, while everyone eats their snack or keeps their hands busy. And then they come up one by one so I can give them some undivided attention while they practice their letter formation.

Another favourite process art activity is marble painting. Simply dollop paint onto your paper/cardboard, and then let the kids roll the marble around the page. This is a little trial and error as to how many marbles to use, how quickly to roll (ie before the paint dries!) and for the little hands to practice holding up the tray and getting the hang of moving the marbles around the tray.

My favourite paints to use are the Giotto Tempura paints. The colours are nice and bright and the paint lasts for ages. They are well worth the extra money spent.

We also had some left over cardboard that we used for these (see the last two photos), and I suggest having more scrap paper/cardboard on hand as the kids always love this activity and will want to do more and more and more.

One of my favourite lesson of the year has been introducing the kids to measurements (and of course mixing of colours!) with this really simple set up. We were given a couple of these polystyrene test tube trays, and when you add droppers/syringes/pippettes they are perfect for all sorts of colour experiments.

Everyone got a turn to help me fill up the jugs with water, and then we had a discussion on colours (and what is a primary and secondary colour…this was a recap for the older kiddies) and then it was all systems go for some really fun colour water play.

This was a really fun & colourful week that I enjoyed just as much as my kiddies.

The Red Shed - The letter 'i' with a focus on insects & ink

These posts document my teaching adventures with the Reggio-inspired ‘school’ I started up in my farm shed in January 2023. I’ll share more about how all this came about soon, but in the mean time, enjoy these moments & learnings.

We spent the last week learning all about Impy Ink aka the letter ‘Ii’ (I love Letter Land!) which led us to learning about insects as well.

We took a lovely long walk down to the dam (accompanied by my two hounds, Zara the Boerboell and our Korean rescue pup, Shadow the Jindo). I had told the kids to collect as many feathers as they could find (I had the plan to use them as quill pens) which led to lots of discussion about all the different birds that the feathers could have come from.

For ‘writing practice’ (I don’t believe in anything too formal in the early years) I use a big white board with lots of different sensory letters for the children to touch and trace. Then they get to have a go at writing the letter themselves with a white board marker. I always start this exercise at snack time, by reading the corresponding Letterland story that goes along with each letter, while everyone eats their snack. And then they come up one by one so I can give them some undivided attention while they practice their letter formation.

I mixed up some pots (glass are best because they are heavy & therefore harder to knock over than plastic…and the little ones really do learn how to handle and be around glass when they are given the opportunity to) of tempura paint & water. Just add more water or paint to get a nice ‘inky’ texture.

I printed out some scanned handwriting sheets (again, not to force any formal handwriting) and let them loose with their quills.

And now on to the Insects!

Over the week we chatted a lot about the different kinds of insects (mentioning what makes an insect an insect). I froze our plastic insect collection into some coloured water (I used liquid food colouring to colour the water) and then set everyone up into pairs with a couple of hammers/plastic knives and a small container of salt. The salt helps to melt the ice (it’s a very slow process though…so definitely take them outside for the sun to speed things up!) and let them loose to hammer and smack to their hearts content. They all loved this activity.

I had a vision of a particular looking piece of art in mind for this week, and I’m sure you can agree that the final product came out beautifully. I printed out an a4 sized beetle (I will attach the file below if you’d like to download a copy of the beetles to make your own) and then gave everyone some watercolours to paint with. My only instruction was to make them as bright as possible, and to try not leave any white space on the beetles.

Yuval Zommer’s Big Book of Bugs is an amazing resource for any lessons on creepy crawlies. I got my copy on Takealot a few years ago.

Then I was set with the arduous task of carefully cutting out each creature (this was much harder than it look due to all the little legs and feelers!). I then pasted them onto brightly coloured paper, trimmed them down and stuck them onto black card and finally laminated.

Here is how they turned out. I just LOVE them!

Laminating anything watercoloured really makes the colours pop (and it also helps with the longevity of the artwork which can now withstand being taken on and off the fridge by sticky little hands!).