It is so fun doing festival theme activities and they are the best way to help your child learn about a festival, the culture and the traditions related to the festival. Of course the best way for a child to learn culture and traditions is to witness it being celebrated first hand at their home but given the fact India is such a culturally diverse nation that we often miss out giving information about the way the same festival is celebrated in other regions of India!! That is why I love making printables and planning festival themed activities encompassing as much age-appropriate information as I could transfer to Shanaya.
Holi is one of the major festivals of India, and is celebrated on the full moon day in the month of Phalgun or March. It is also known as festival of colours and Shanaya loves colors. She wants everything to be multicolored. 🙂 So these are simple and easy to set up activities which you can do with your kids to celebrate the Holi festival and kids will love these activities!!
#1 Read Books About the Festival
You can teach your child about the festival by reading these books to them. All are available on Amazon.
- Amma Tell Me About Holi,
- Festivals of the world Holi,
- Festival of Colours
- Let’s Celebrate Holi!
If you want to know more about the stories behind this colorful festival you can read up about them here.
#2 HOLI ART AND CRAFT ACTIVITIES
- Pichkari / Water Gun Craft – Things required – paper roll tube, colored cardstock paper, glue, paint, white paper, ruler, scissors, pencil, paper straw, washi tape, one pompom. Apply glue on the tube and roll it on white paper (cut to proper length) to cover it completely. Ask your child to paint it in her choice of color. While the tube is drying, cut out a circle of 1.5 in diameter from colored (your child’s choice) cardstock paper. Punch a hole in the middle of the circle. Fit the paper straw in the hole keeping one end small and bend that end. This is to make the base of the pichkari. Snip lots of little tabs into the bottom of one end of the cardboard tube and press them inside so that we can glue the base. Glue the base with bent end inside. Decorate the tube with colorful washi tape. Cut another circle (3.5 inches in diameter) from colored cardstock paper of child’s choice to make the cone shape top of the pichkari. Glue the cone to the top of the tube. Glue a pom-pom on the straw handle. Your colorful pichkari is ready!!
- Tape Resist Coloring – Things required Masking Tape, watercolor paper and Oil Pastel Crayons. Cut pieces of tape and stick on watercolor paper to form the letters Happy Holi and ask the child to colour the sheet in any way she likes. After the coloring is done, remove the tape pieces. Voila! A beautiful art piece is ready! You can also do painting using the same technique.
- Spray Painting – For Spray Painting, we used watered down Crayola finger-paint colors and a toothbrush. The activity included learning uppercase and lowercase letters of HOLI.
The end result
- Raised Salt Painting – For Raised Salt Painting, I drew outlines on a piece of paper. Then we put glue on the outlines. Then Shanaya sprinkled salt on the drawings. We tapped off the extra salt. Then with a dropper she put different colour drops along the outlines and it was fun seeing the color spread on its own. The act of sprinkling salt and using the dropper are great for fine motor skill development. I got the idea from here.
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Marble Painting :- Things required – Marbles,Paint, A shallow box or tray and Paper. I just put some different color paints (bit diluted) directly on the paper placed inside the tray and put the marbles inside too. We just rolled them around and as the marbles streaked through the paint we got an abstract art piece!! Another method to do marble painting is to put marbles in different colours of a tempera paint set or in small different containers and cover them in paint. Then take them out using spoon and put them on paper placed inside the box or tray. And then just ask the child to roll about the marbles.
#3 STEM ACTIVITIES BASED ON COLOURS
- Rainbow in a Test Tube – Things required- 4 glasses with same water quantity, sugar, food colours, a test tube and 4 droppers. We made 4 different colored sugar solutions with 4 different densities (1st glass 1 spoon, 2nd glass 2 spoons, 3rd glass 4 spoons and 4th glass 6 spoons) and poured them in test-tube starting from the most dense one and saw the layered effect. After doing one, my daughter did another on her own and then her own experimentation started.
- Rainbow on a Plate Experiment – Things required – A plate or bowl… something that is slightly sloped in towards the middle, Water – Medium temperature tap water and Colorful candy like GEMS, Skittles or M&M. Ask you child to place the candies around the circumference of the plate in a circle. Once the circle is complete, add in medium temperature water in the middle. Make sure you add enough to go right to the edge of the candy on both sides. The food colouring coatings of the candies start dissolving and you can see the beautiful results!
- Walking Rainbow Experiment – We did the Walking Rainbow Experiment. We learned what are primary colors and what colors we are getting by mixing them. Further we can teach capillary action is how plants pull water from the soil and take it up to the leaves to make their food. After sometime the water stabilizes and ends up at the same level in all the jars.Things required
- 6 wide mouth short height glasses (I had only 5 of a set so used one cup as the 6th glass),
- Wet wipes cut in two breadth wise and each part folded in thirds lengthwise
- Food colors (red, yellow, and blue).
Place 6 glasses in a row and pour water in the 1st, 3rd, and 5th cup about 3/4 full. Add red color in the 1st glass, yellow in the 3rd and blue in the 5th one. Place all the glasses in a circle and the wet wipes connecting two adjacent glasses as shown in pic below. Soon you will observe the colored water begins to crawl up the paper towel or wet wipe and the empty glasses in between start filling up with colored water which is the mix of the two adjacent colors.
#4 HOLI LEARNING ACTIVITIES
Apart from reading books to your child to teach her about the festival and story behind it, you can also do literacy, logical, visual and numeracy activities with them to help them relate the traditions and Holi objects to the festival better. These free literacy, math, logic,maze and visual discrimination printables will ensure that your children have fun while they learn.
Click here to know more about the FREE worksheets/printables.
A SNEAK PREVIEW OF THE FREEBIES!
Some more interesting activities for kids based on Holi festival theme are
10 Holi Crafts and Activities for Kids
RaisingShanaya 