This is the first time I decided to plan some upcoming festival (Holi in this case or for us Bengalis “Dol”) based activities for my daughter and Holi is the best festival to start that because it is the festival of colors and Shanaya loves colors. She wants everything to be multicolored. 🙂 So these are the activities we did just two days before the festival. Simple and easy to set up activities which you can do anytime with your kids and kids love these activities!!
#1st Activity – We read a book about the festival titled HOLI from Om Kidz Publication. I was slightly disappointed as the book didn’t mention the Lord Krishna- Radha version of Holi’s background story..It only mentioned the Hirankashipu – Prahlad story. So I told her that myself. But a good book by Om Kidz Publications.
If you want to know the stories you can read up about them here.
#2nd Activity – Then we did two types of painting – spray painting and raised salt painting. It was our first time with the both types of painting but we had lots of fun nonetheless!!
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
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.
#3rd Activity – We did the Walking Rainbow Experiment. It’s a wonderful way for kids to learn about capillary action and color mixing. NOTE – Though the colors red, yellow, and blue are not the main primary colors of painting but that is what is followed in elementary school …most probably because it is hard to teach little children difficult colors like Cyan and Magenta. Cyan, Magenta and Yellow are the actual primary colors used in printing and painting whereas Red, Blue and Green are the primary colors of the color system used in computer, mobile, and television screens.
We learned what are primary colors and what colors we are getting by mixing them. The walking rainbow science experiment is a good example to teach capillary action, which is how liquid can move up something, rather than follow the usual pull of gravity and pull down. 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.
I used these things – 6 wide mouth glasses (I had only 5 of a set so used one cup as the 6th glass), dried wet wipes cut in two breadth wise and each part folded in thirds lengthwise and Food colors (red, yellow, and blue). It was our first science experiment at home and our first STEM activity.
#4th Activity – There is a wonderful printable at the Vitamin Simple Club blog which has different activities for kids based on HOLI theme. Check it out here. So we did all the activities in the printable.
Some more interesting activities for kids based on Holi festival theme are
Make a water gun craft using a paper roll tube.
10 Holi Crafts and Activities for Kids
15 Amazingly Fun Holi Crafts and Activities for Kids
RaisingShanaya 