The most important thing to me is my family. While I love blogging and helping out others, my family always comes first. My kids are at such a fun age, 2 and 4, and I am trying to capture more of the things that we do together with the hope that it might also provide some fun activities for other families. So as I mentioned before, I am starting a Time Out With Kids series to share some of our adventures.
Now that summer is here, it gives us so many endless possibilities of things that we can do outside together. Living in the Chicago area, there seems to be more cold days than warm ones so I try to take advantage of each beautiful day that we have. For my son’s birthday, I always renew his subscription to Our Big Backyard, a publication by the National Wildlife Federation. Each time it arrives, he exclaims, “I got mail today!” and it makes it worth every penny I spent on it. Well, in the May 2011 issue, there was a story about how the animals went on a Rainbow Walk. Immediately the kids wanted to do one of their own.
It’s a real simple concept—you go for a walk and try to find something of every color of the rainbow- red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and purple. My first impulse was to make some fancy sheet for them but if there’s one thing my kids have taught me, it’s to keep it simple. So I used some half sheets of paper from the bottom of printable coupon print-outs and I let them take some crayons and scribble a small sketch of each color down the left column. I dug in my supplies closet and found two small clipboards I had picked up in the dollar bins at Target. Since they are still so young, they would hand me their clipboards when they found an object of one of those colors as we went on our walk in our wagon and I’d log their find. They had a lot of fun and wanted to continue on with the rainbow activities during the week.
We took one day and came up with rainbow foods, simply brainstorming to think of foods for each color. Blue is a tough one unless you go with non-natural food coloring items. Otherwise we thought of blueberries and blue potatoes. We then would try to eat one color of the rainbow each day–Tomatoes, Oranges, Bananas, Asparagus, Blueberries and Purple Grapes, etc.
We also checked out some books on rainbows/colors at our library. A few included:
This last one became a favorite of my son’s and you can guess his next request—a rainbow garden! We are going to work on this one by buying what I call “rescue plants” throughout the year. These are plants that are discounted and just need a little extra TLC to keep them growing. We’ll also use some flower seeds I got from that great Seeds of Change deal. I also found a packet of Poppy Ladybird seeds at a local nursery that were just too cute to pass up, as they look like little ladybugs! This should create some fun time outdoors for us.
The kids loved their rainbow walk so much that they’ve requested we go on so many more since. It’s such a simple idea and I hope that you take Time Out With Kids this week and just enjoy their fabulous eye-opening world. I’m always so amazed at how much they teach me, and the greatest of these is–enjoy life, keep things simple and find the fun in anything!
More fun to come next week!