Flashing Back: A Lesson on Weather

This week our church is doing Vacation Bible School "VBS". Therefore, we will be "flashing back" to some recent days in May of this year (2013), that I was unable to post about but that are totally post worthy -because our family will be taking full advantage of VBS!

Today we had a weather themed day. It has been raining for a few days in a row and I thought that this would be quite appropriate!

We started out by using plastic tweezers to pick up colored pom pom's and then transfer them into the yellow bowl. I called the pom poms "our clouds" for today's activity (we pretended).

This is a great fine motor skill building activity.

Next I got out our copy of "Colorful Umbrella's", a color identification book that I downloaded from This Reading Mama. 

I also got out the blank copies of this book so that we could color each page and make a book specifically for Vada's collection.

After we spent a good deal of time coloring (Vada will stay focused coloring if I or someone else is coloring with her.) I brought out the Jesus Storybook Bible and read a version of one of my favorite biblical stories, Noah's Ark and how God promised to never flood the earth again. Every time I see a rainbow, I think of this promise and it brings me peace and it reminds me that there will always be a calm after a storm.

(On a side note, when I was driving to the hospital to identify my mother after her accident I was so nervous! About a twenty minutes from the hospital where she was being held I noticed that a small rainbow was in the sky. It remained there until I got to the hospital. While I was driving I thanked God out loud for that small gift. Later, after going through my mom's house and belongings and finding out that she found God, I felt even more comforted by that rainbow because I felt that maybe it was a gift not only from God but maybe from my mother as well. You never know.)

After reading about God's promise we did some counting practice and color recognition with this rainbow that I also downloaded from This Reading Mama. (I colored it myself before laminating it, I couldn't have a plain rainbow.)

I wanted to make something clear. I show a lot of things that look pretty neatly done, like above. However, Vada is still being told step by step how to do this. She is getting much better at color recognition but has a ways to go and I don't want anyone to look at my posts and begin to think that that she is doing this so perfect, when she is not. The reason I feel it necessary to make this a point is that I do a ton of research and while I don't find myself in the habit of comparing Vada's abilities to other children her age (with and without Down syndrome) I do feel like it is something that I may do on occasions, even if I don't intend to do so. Therefore, I am assuming that others may do so as well and I don't want to mislead anyone with what I am sharing. I want to share my ideas and help educate so that you feel more confident in educating your children. So, the below picture shows how I tell Vada what I would like her to do with the pom pom. Eventually, she will be able to listen to the directions when they are given to her and do this on her own and then even further down the road, she will just know what to do when this activity is given to her. 

After our rainbow activity we read Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. 

Finally, we did a really fun craft of making a storm painting.

Vada used rain stamps as well as clouds, lighting, and even the sun.

Somehow she got a huge glob of blue in her hair and I have no idea how it happened but oh well.

This was her finished work. I think it belongs in a gallery but then I am biased.