This week for Storytime with Make and Takes, we read Planting a Rainbow by Lois Ehlert. With Spring planting upon us, I couldn’t resist choosing this fun and colorful story. This book talks about all the colors of the rainbow and where we see them. There’s a rainbow of colors we see in the garden with lots of colorful flowers to plant and vegetables to eat.
To celebrate this book, we chose to plant a rainbow of flowers in our own garden. We went to the local garden nursery and searched for red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple flowers. My kids loved helping find the colorful flowers. Blue and green were a little bit harder to find. For blue, we found a large perennial plant called Lithidora. For green, I decided to plant the herb Parsley. I don’t really know of any plants that have green flowers, do you? You could also use a pretty grass plant.
I almost planted this rainbow in little individual pots for each color and was going to have them coming down our steps. But I found we had just enough space in our little patch of dirt by the house. We got out the garden gloves and planted the rainbow right in a row. I didn’t plant all of the flowers that came in the pack. I saved some for a large planter we have by the deck. We are now ready to water and watch our rainbow grow.
Another part of this fun book talked about planting a rainbow of vegetables. You could easily find colorful veggies to plant in a row. You could do tomatoes, carrots, yellow peppers or tomatoes, broccoli or cucumbers, blue potatoes, purple/red onion or eggplant. The book gives lots of suggestions for different plants and vegetables to use.
Have fun reading and planting you own rainbow garden! I’ll be sure to post again when our rainbow is in full bloom.
Burpee has zinnias that are green! A very pretty charming lime!
Here’s the article: http://www.examiner.com/x-42769-Columbus-Early-Childhood-Parenting-Examiner~y2010m4d20-Growing-a-Garden-by-Louise-Elhert–Story-Time–activities-to-inspire-your-young-gardeners
I just published an article that included a link to this blog entry! The article is about “Planting a Rainbow” @ our local story time and a few SIMPLE extension activities, as well as your own ‘garden rainbow’. I haven’t have time to fully explore your site yet, but plan to SOON…you look like my kind of mom! Can’t wait to dig in to your site and my garden!
I am a school librarian, and I did a similar activity with my kindergarteners. I drew pictures of several different blooms and photocopied them. After reading the book, the kids colored and cut out the flowers. We taped them to a craft stick, and then “planted” them in a tupperware filled with sand. My flowerboxes look so cheerful, and I’ve gotten lots of compliments from people stopping in the library.
What a great idea. Looks like your son had fun planting!
I love this book. I use it every year in my preschool classes. This year we will make phonics flower gardens. Great post!
hi, we just did this storytime and activity the other day; you’ll have to go check it out. thanks for the great idea.
There is a green “flower” – I can’t think of the name, except that “bells of Ireland” or something akin to that come to mind.
Love your blog.
Love you, too.
Aunt Gwen
Our Rainbow garden had an accident. Our orange flower got too cold from a snow fall we had here! It died, sadly. So we are planning to replant the orange flower next week, when the weather is supposed to stay WARM!
But the Rainbow is still very cheery and bright. I love it!
Great idea! i love it. Matt is getting so big and grown up. Hope you’re feeling okay with the pregger belly!!
love ya.
You are so amazing. Honestly. I have no idea how you manage to accomplish so much, every single day. Wow.
When I interned at an elementary school art room we read Wag A Tail by Lois Ehlert to kindergarten students. Then they did really cute collages in the style of the book’s illustrations
So cute!