Early Childhood Physical Education: The Rainbows of Victoria Falls and Niagara Falls

Victoria Falls

Victoria Falls,located on the border of Zimbabwe and Zambia, in Africa, is one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World. Niagara Falls, located between New York and Canada is one of the Seven Natural Wonders of North America. Both of these amazing sites are giving us the opportunity to discuss rainbows in Physical Education. Students are learning about the acronym for the seven different colors of the rainbow, ROY G BIV (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet). We also talked about how the water droplets from raindrops or waterfalls act as a prism and bend (refract) the light so it separates white light into the seven different colors of a rainbow. These colors bounce off the back of the droplet and reflect into the sky as a rainbow. I used a type of prism to demonstrate this process to the children. My explanation has certainly been the simplified version, but children are grasping the idea that light is made up of seven colors and separates as it enters a water droplet, which is a kind of prism.

We started with an activity called Rainbow Hunt. Children were given a paper with an uncolored rainbow on it and only the names of the colors to guide them. (I helped the younger children with the reading, but kindergarten handled it on their own.) They went in search of colored markers, hidden under cones, and colored in their rainbow as they ran from cone to cone. We also did a Rainbow Relay where students chose a colored image from a bucket and found where it fit on the rainbow. They stuck the image to the correct spot after dribbling a soccer ball up to the rainbow. When everything was complete, we had a colored rainbow. The last activity we did was act like water tumbling over the cliffs of Niagara Falls. We used a rounded gymnastics mat and did a forward roll.