Fine-Motor Rainbow Art for Preschoolers

I absolutely love this week’s #PlayfulPreschool theme! Rainbows! So many great ideas that I can’t wait to use them all! Be sure to check them out at the bottom of this post. My preschooler had a blast with our fine-motor rainbow art. She was begging for more after all the supplies had run dry, so I know this is an activity she will definitely want to repeat. In fact, we had so much fun, that I will be posting about an extension activity tomorrow! We have so many color activities to share with you!

Materials needed for Fine-Motor Rainbow Art:

White card stock (the thicker the better!)

School glue

Salt

Water droppers (I found these in the alcohol ink section of Hobby Lobby)

7 small containers (we used a weekly pill holder from the dollar store)

Food coloring

Water

More Color Fun: Free Color Sorting Mats & Spinner Game

The first thing I did was prepare the colored water. I love that the 7-day pill containers already had most of the colors of the rainbow. It was just missing indigo, but it did have a clear container that we used instead.

For the tiny containers I used the following liquid food coloring amounts:

Red: 10 drops red

Orange: 6 drops red, 4 drops yellow

Yellow: 10 drops yellow

Green: 10 drops green

Blue: 10 drops blue

Indigo: 6 drops blue, 3 drops red

Violet: 6 drops red, 5 drops blue

I will say in big.bold.letters….

This is a messy activity!

We were lucky enough to have a beautiful day, so we did our activity outside. If you do it inside, cover your space with a plastic table cloth and stay far away from your furniture.

(Don’t say I didn’t warn you…lol!)

More Color Learning Fun: Colors Preschool Mega Pack

How to create your rainbow:

Draw a rainbow with the glue. You need 7 lines (one for each color). Because Shiloh does not have the hand strength nor coordination to draw with the glue she had lots of help from Daddy while I took pictures.

After you are finished drawing with the glue, sprinkle salt liberally over all of the glue. When you are finished gently shake the paper back and forth to help the stray salt stick to the glue.

Using the droppers, squeeze the different colors of water onto the rainbow. I really loved the droppers that we got because they were long enough to reach over the paper without too much trouble and they were very easy to squeeze making them a perfect tool for Shiloh.

Lately Shiloh has been chatting up a storm. I think we’re around 100 words now with some really cute phrases (a huge change from a year ago). But one thing we thought she was struggling with was her colors.

Today, however, she was showing off!

Blue, reen, wed, runge, p ple.

She was repeating them so fast, and trying to dip her dropper at the same time that we were having a hard time keeping up with her! Daddy ditched me to go check some multiplication for daughter #2 and I was left alone with the color crazed child!

This was seriously one of the most fun activities we’ve done in a long time! It’s spurred all kinds of ideas, so be prepared for more color activities coming soon!

While this is a fun craft all by itself, we actually worked on a lot of different skills while we played:

Fine-motor skills (squeezing the dropper)

Hand-eye coordination (watching carefully to put the color in the correct place)

Speech skills (we worked on color names and really fun new word- Squeeze!)

Patience (oh wait, that was a skill I was learning!)

Check out what else we created after we finished with our rainbow!

And don’t miss out on the other great rainbow activities from the #PlayfulPreschool team!

• Rainbow Letter Formation Sticky Wall
• Language Activities for Preschoolers: Rainbow Climb
• Inventing Their Own Songs to Encourage Creativity
• Rainbow Domino Game
• Rainbow Patterns with Blocks
• Scented Rainbow Science and Sensory Play 
• Preschool Engineering with Rainbows 
• Design a Rainbow Technology Connection
• Disappearing Rainbow Colors