I first saw this idea on Almost Unschoolers and then shared it with the teachers…
We are exploring rainbows and in one of our activity boxes the children have found these rainbow craft stick puzzles.
At first all the craft sticks were all mixed up into one pile and because there were three sets of rainbow puzzles in the mix, the children had a little bit of trouble figuring out which sticks went together to create one rainbow…
Soon they began to realize that they could turn the sticks over and put the numbers on the back of each stick in numerical order…
But even this presented a problem because there were three sets of the exact same numbers so the rainbows were still not working out exactly right…
Finally, after much problem solving and with a little teacher assistance, the craft sticks were separated into three groups and the children then went to work again trying to put together their rainbow craftstick puzzles…
We did have one other unexpected problem with our craft stick puzzles. When the children put the sticks in numerical order first then flipped over each stick, the rainbow still didn’t line up correctly. Now that the sticks had been separated into rainbow groups, the children realized that they could visually put together the puzzle without having to rely on the numbers…
This activity really did bring unexpected challenges to the table but the children stayed with it and in the end were quite satisfied when their rainbows were complete!
Rainbow books available on Amazon…