Montessori-Inspired Rainbow Activities with Spielgaben {Free Printables}

I love rainbow activities for St. Patrick’s Day, spring, and rainbow unit studies. Today, I’m sharing some fun Montessori-inspired rainbow activities I prepared using Spielgaben educational toys and free printables I found online. Spielgaben educational toys are designed for up to age 12, although my activities today are for toddlers and preschoolers.

This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of Spielgaben. All opinions are honest and my own. This post also contains affiliate links (at no cost to you).

In case you’re not familiar with Spielgaben toys, they are exceptionally high-quality educational toys designed for ages 3-12. You can see from the photo that the cabinet is very high quality and fits in well in a room with traditional Montessori materials. I love the new, easily removable drawers in version 4. The yarn balls from the 1st Spielgaben set can be used with babies and toddlers, too.

The Spielgaben complete set comes with over 700 pages of full-color printed learning materials. These printed materials help you as a parent or teacher easily use Spielgaben toys educationally with your child and/or students.

Spielgaben Materials Used in This Post

For this post, I used the Spielgaben yarn balls from set 1. I used the wooden sticks from set 8. (If you’d like the wooden sticks from the earlier Spielgaben versions, Spielgaben will sell them to you at minimal cost to go along with version 4.) I also used the wooden dots (points) from set 10 and the wooden parquetry tablets from set 7.

In this post, I’ll link to free printables which will help make the activities simple to prepare yet attractive. I’ll also tell you where I found the materials for my activities.

Rainbow Bag and Yarn Ball Basket

If you’ve followed my previous Spielgaben posts (see links below), you know how much my 15-month-old granddaughter, Zoey, has loved the Spielgaben yarn balls since she was a couple of months old. She hasn’t used them as much in the past few months, but she had her interest renewed with the rainbow bag and yarn ball basket I prepared for her.

I used the free rainbow bag printable from Creative Parties. I printed out 6 bags on cardstock and assembled them except for the ribbon or string handles. They were very easy to assemble. Then I just added one of each color of yarn ball. Chea, Christina, Zoey, and I went to a nearby park to give Zoey a chance to explore the basket outdoors. I simply said the name of each color when Zoey took the yarn ball out of its bag.

Zoey had so much fun that she wanted to carry two of the yarn balls to the playground and continued to hold them while swinging and going down the slide. She played with the rainbow bags and yarn balls much of the afternoon and evening. I’ve had fun watching the change in developmental stages Zoey’s gone through while loving the Spielgaben yarn balls. Now she enjoys putting the balls back in the bags or back on a shelf when she’s finished. The bags were still in perfect condition at the end of the day as well.

Rainbow Shape Tray

I used four of the free tracing shapes cards from the Rainbow Tot Pack by 1+1+1=1. I didn’t use the cards for tracing shapes but for matching shapes. The wooden parquetry blocks aren’t the exact size of the shapes in the cards, but they’re easy for toddlers or preschoolers to match anyway. I used a Montessori Services clear acrylic tray for the activity.

Rainbow Counting Cards and Wooden Dots

This activity uses the 0-5 free rainbow counting cards from Confessions of a Homeschooler. Younger children could place the dots with their fingertips. You could add a tool for transferring the dots if you wish. I used the exact number of dots needed as a control of error. The wooden dots are bigger than the dots on the cards, but it still works to place a wooden dot on each black dot on the counting cards.

Making a Rainbow with Wooden Sticks

This activity uses the free rainbow printable from The Pleasantest Thing along with the smallest Spielgaben wooden sticks. This can be a great fine-motor activity and an easy way for a child to create a rainbow by placing the colored sticks along the dotted lines. The sticks don’t end exactly where the rainbow ends, though, so I wouldn’t recommend it for a child who’s very concerned about the exactness of an activity.

Find the Letter R’s Tray

For this activity, I used the free Find the R’s printable from the Romping and Roaring R Pack from 3 Dinosaurs. Here, the page sizing for printing is set to custom size scale 55%. I used yellow wooden dots to cover the uppercase letters and red wooden dots to cover the lowercase letters. I always emphasize phonetic sounds, so I would introduce the activity by saying that both uppercase and lowercase “r” make the sound /r/. To focus on fine-motor skills, I added a sugar tong from Montessori Services. A strawberry huller or tweezers would work well, too. Younger children could place the dots with their fingertips. I used the exact number of dots needed as a control of error.

All My Spielgaben Posts

Many of these include links to free printables! (Click on an image to go to the related blog post. The gallery is ordered according to publication date with my latest post at the top.)

Version 4 of Spielgaben Educational Toys 

I highly recommend Spielgaben as an amazing educational material for home or school. Even though the toys aren’t inexpensive, they’re definitely worth the price because of the high quality of materials and number of years your children or students can use them.

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