Rainbow Stew

Last week in my preschool classroom we talked about St. Patrick day. We are also studying a unit on colors right now and tied this all together with some lessons on the rainbow. As a special project I made the things for rainbow stew and brought them in for the students to play with and create their own rainbow stew to bring home.
To make rainbow stew I used 1 cup of cornstarch, 1/3 cup sugar, 4 cups of water and food coloring. I made three different colored patches because I needed enough for forty kids, but if you wanted to make less you could add the color after cooking once you divided it into smaller portions. So I took all these things and put them in a pot of the stove. I cooked them on med/high until they started to thicken. I made one patch of red, one blue, and one yellow.

I brought them all to school and with the kids I put a small portion of each color in a zip lock bag and taped it shut. The kids could them squeeze the bag and play with it to mix the colors. As the colors started to mix they were able to see all the colors of the rainbow start to form. I few students were very ambitions and did mix the colors until they turned brown but it took longer to do this if I had put the right amount of mixture in the bag and most of the kids stopped when they saw all the colors.

The students really enjoyed this and many even wanted to make more than one bag.

This was a great activity for young children.

This is also a great stress release and many adults have enjoyed mixing the colors as well.
Once the bags are down and not over mixed you can also hang them in the window to use to create brighter colors as the sun shines through.