We have an enormous pile of paving stones left over from building new steps and a small deck in our backyard. And we tend to find random uses for them, whether that's for projects around the yard or for play ideas with the kids.
These paving stones just happen to make an excellent canvas for coloring with sidewalk chalk, as you will soon see.
See, one day, I had an idea to turn the leftover paving stones into a rainbow to color.
I thought it was a rather brilliant idea, but I had no idea it would be as big of a hit with my oldest son J as it was. Seriously, this chalk rainbow activity was a big success and kept my son busy all day.
By the way, this rainbow activity was a great way to work on colors and fine motor skills. We even snuck in some heavy work and proprioceptive sensory input, as you will see in a bit.
Chalk Rainbow Activity: What You'll Need
There ended up being two parts to this activity. Part one involved making and coloring the rainbow, while part two involved some water play. But here is what you'll need for the main part of this activity:
- Paving stones/bricks (or something similar) - We have tons of these kicking around from when we built a deck in our backyard
- Sidewalk chalk in a variety of colors - We're making a rainbow after all!
To make the rainbow, I started lining up the paving stones into a rainbow shape. It looked like so:
You can see some lines on some of the paving stones in the above photo. That's from this fun outdoor road activity. But we'll be coloring over those shortly.
Don't have paving stones? Draw the outline of a rainbow on a sidewalk or driveway instead.
Of course, the boys had to help move some of the stones too. It makes for a great heavy work activity, which not only provides lots of sensory input, but is extremely regulating.
Once the rainbow shape was set up, I colored the first block or two of each stripe of the rainbow with chalk. I started with a reddish/pink, then orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple, as you can see below.
Then it was time to hand it off to the boys to see what they would do.
Coloring a Rainbow with Chalk
Each boy picked up a piece of chalk and started coloring side by side. But that would be short lived.
In the end, my oldest, J, did most of the coloring. He was so focused, coloring each stone fully with chalk, one by one.
K came back and helped out from time to time. You know, in the way toddlers do best...
After all that coloring, the rainbow was complete and it turned out gorgeous! I mean, look at how pretty it is!
After it was all colored, the boys decided to walk on the rainbow and sing a rainbow song. At the moment, my boys' favorite rainbow song is "Colors of the Rainbow" from Signing Time (we love this show for learning sign language!). We sang it together as they walked across the different colors.
Time for Some Water Play!
After lunch, while K was napping, J and I went back outside with a large bucket of water and some recycled plastic cups. J started dumping some water on the different paving stones, trying to cover the entire rainbow.
It was really warm out on this particular day so the water evaporated quite quickly. So he kept repeating it over and over for nearly an hour. Yes, you read that right. An hour!
He continued to dump water as he walked across the stones and I love the following picture. You can see J comparing his foot to the wet footprint he left on the paving stone.
Like I mentioned earlier, this activity kept my oldest son engaged and busy all day long. He spent quite some time coloring the rainbow and then another hour washing off the stones.
This activity goes to show that play doesn't always have to involve fancy toys or require spending a lot of money. You can simply reuse things that you have around your house and present it in new ways.
After all, we've used these paving stones to make DIY roads for cars, a DIY ball run, and now for this chalk rainbow activity.
