Rainbow "wind thingy"

Last night we needed a good project after dinner.....So we made a pretty rainbow decoration to hang above our picnic table.

1) get a stick

2) Tie a piece of twine to each end.

3) Find ribbon in the colors of the rainbow. You can either loop them over or just tie them onto the stick.
(initially I had planned to use all different ribbon types in the colors, but I stumbled upon a baggie of ribbon in all the colors in my ribbon stash, so we decided that would be perfect!)

4) I went ahead and cut them so that red was the longest, orange a little shorter, etc. with purple being the shortest, to vary the movement of them and also to begin to teach initial concepts of length and sequence.

Q helped me unwrap the ribbon spools one by one and we talked about the colors as we tied them on. She had fun running around the yard with the finished project before we hung it up, and she chose the spot where we hung it. We've already enjoyed watching the ribbons dancing in the breeze!

Infants--would love to watch the pretty ribbons.....you could also hang this inside over baby's area..... Talk about the colors with baby as you show him each strand of ribbon.

Preschoolers--they could complete this task independently. Tying the ribbon is fabulous fine motor practice.

For an extension of the fine motor, you could also let your child thread matching beads on each ribbon--red beads on red, yellow on yellow, etc.