Brighten up your classroom for summer with this fun activity!
This is just a fun watermelon idea I thought I would take a minute to share with you. I just love watermelon and with summer time quickly approaching, we spent a little time learning about watermelons in our classroom.
The How-To
To make a watermelon suncatcher, we started by putting one good squeeze of hair gel (purchased from the dollar store) in a Ziploc baggie.
Then we added a few drops of red food coloring and some black seeds cut out of foam. I had planned for the children to use real watermelon seeds but it turned out that the real watermelon I brought to school that day was a seedless watermelon so I had to do a quick change of plans.
Once the gel, seeds, and food color were in the baggie, the children pressed the air out of the baggie and then sealed the baggie shut.
To add a little extra reinforcement, we added clear packing tape to the tops of each baggie so they wouldn’t open up during our color blending.
Sensory Exploration
The children squeezed the baggies until all the gel and food color was blended together. I also invited the children to lay the baggies flat on the table to see if they could push their seeds around the baggies with their fingers.
To finish off our baggies, we added green tape to the top of the baggies to serve as our watermelon rind. Well, I added the green tape – have you ever handed a group of preschoolers a roll of tape and a baggie? I can tell you it’s quite tricky.
And then we taped our suncatchers in the window and they looked fabulous.
Enjoying our Watermelon Suncatchers!
The suncatchers added a beautiful, soft glow to the classroom window I just love it!
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I love your watermellon suncathers.
Do you know the Water mellon song?
Malika – we just made one up. It goes, “Watermelon, watermelon, watermelon in the patch.” We start out slow then go faster and faster – kind of like a tongue twister. I will be blogging about our song asap.
Aw , these are adorable. We just finished making some sensory bags. I will have to add one like this to the mix. They are so fun, and especially great for babies 🙂
Those are adorable, I may use it during the birthday party of my seven years old.
Ally
Just adorable!! Even though I am not watermelon fan… I still love watermelon crafts. 🙂 Happy almost summer!! I hope you get a well deserved vacation soon!
Love the finished look of the green tape rind! 🙂
Very cute. The green tape is a nice touch.
When I first saw these, I thought they contained actual, squished watermelon and I thought what a bad idea… You were able to get the colour exactly right and it really looks like watermelon. It was a great idea!
I thought the gel was squished up watermelon too! You did get the perfect watermelon color!! I love these. I can’t wait to make them with my boys. This could be fun on a picnic too. I always have trouble getting both boys to stay at the table when we are at family things and they are done eating in about 5 minutes and all of the adults in the family sit around and talk for ages! I’ll have to remember to bring something like this for them.
What an adorable idea! These are really cute 🙂
Hi Deb! Tim in Fukuoka, Japan here! I’m gonna try this with my small kindy-like kids. I’m tempted to try with it elementary school kids too…. I might give it a try.
Peace