Home Schooling Fun With Magical Story Jars School of Cool!
Kids all over the world are creating and displaying beautiful rainbows in their windows so we thought this would make the perfect theme for our next Magical Story Jars ‘School of Cool’ activity!
In this blog post we have put together five rainbow activities for you to dip in and out of as you and the kids please. Our family tried and tested these activities over the course of a week, you could do the same or even try a full day of rainbow-based activities, simply tailor it to whatever works best for you and your family.
As always, we have included a fantastic story activity for you all and we are super excited to see what you come up with. Here are your rainbow activities broken down into subjects:
1 Health, well being and PE
Firstly, to keep us upbeat and happy we wore different colours of the rainbow whilst we used our daily exercise token (just once) to go on a walk and spot as many rainbows in windows as possible. This could even be done from your window or garden. We also made and ate lunch in the colours of the rainbow. This gave us a great opportunity to talk about the importance of eating healthily. I’m not going to pretend it was easy getting them to eat the veg and we may have added in some green jelly in addition to other green fruit and vegetables, but displaying everything in a rainbow theme definitely helped to entice their taste buds!
2 English….the Magical Story Jars part!
OK so I know we’re bias, but this was our favourite part! We created a rainbow themed story inspired by the ‘magical rainbow’ setting story card from our fairy tale Magical Story Jars. You can see the nice story combination we have chose for you listed below and on the cover photo for this blog. You can also download our free Magical Story Jar themed writing templates: We have done a template for younger or arty ones here along with a template for avid writers here.
We sprinkled the magic dust over the following three story cards to create our story:
Story character - a slippery green frog with spots on his back.
Story setting – next to a magical rainbow.
Story plot – met Prue the posh dragon who got teased for being different.
We suggest using the half page template with space for a story scene to be drawn for younger or more arty story makers and the full page template for older story makers. If you have a pre-schooler and they want to tell you all about their home grown story but they aren’t keen on writing, then you could offer to scribe it down for them or they could draw a scene from their imaginary story!
3 Science
We created our own rainbows by doing a super easy and fun experiment we found on explorable.com which shows the conditions needed for a rainbow to appear and helps kids to understand how rainbows are formed. Is all you need for this one is a torch, a pocket mirror and a glass of water. The darker the room the better, so if you have blackout blinds in the kids’ bedrooms then be sure to do the experiment there.
4 Maths
We counted how many rainbows we could see on our rainbow hunt which helped our five-year-old with his counting skills. We also used some of the rainbow Twinkl maths resources for both our kids by doing a quick ‘rainbow’ search on Twinkl when we got back from our walk. Theming the week around rainbows meant the activity sheets had real purpose and there were no problems having to entice them into completing them!
5 Art…more help from Magical Story Jars!
On the final day, we created a book cover for our rainbow themed stories. Click here for a free Magical Story Jars printable book cover activity sheet. We stuck our completed covers in our homeschooling books, you could do the same or instead display it in your window or send it onto a friend or grandparent in need of some smiles.
Be sure to make your book cover look as interesting as possible so the reader wants to pick it up and find out more. You could get all your books out and think about what you like about the covers and what made you first want to pick the book up? Don’t forget to give your rainbow story a cool and catchy title. You might find it helps to decide on a title after you have written your story. Finally, be sure to try and make your cover intriguing rather than a description of the story.
There are so many activities you can do with rainbows and let’s face it; they make us feel really happy. Don’t forget to tag us in your rainbow story activities. Did your story have a happy ending? What happened to Prue the dragon? We would love to hear some of your rainbow stories and see your book covers! Tag us in your stories and book covers and use the hashtag #MagicalStoryJars. Have fun story makers!
