What goes up when the rain comes down?  An umbrella!

Rainy spring days are a given in my area and since I walk students from the main school building to a cottage for speech, we have a lot of weather chit-chat going on.  All the time.  Often under my HUGE rainbow striped umbrella.

What comes out when the rain comes down?

Some rainy day crafting!

Crayon relief drawings are great fun and a cool science experiment too.  Have students color a picture (or write words or anything you’re working on) using crayon.  Maybe you want to make a list of weather words, or clothing you need when it rains.  Maybe you want to order some rain descriptions from lightest to heaviest (mist/fog, drizzle, rain, downpour, thunderstorm, hurricane). Or maybe you want to draw a picture of what happens in the garden after the rain.

If you still have one of those “clear” wax crayons from an egg dye kit, all the better!  You can use it as “invisible” writing then, cover the sheet with a quick wash of watercolor and watch it really pop!

Why does this happen?  The wax repels (great vocab word) the water.

I like to collect cups of rain to use for the washing (and, actually you can add food coloring to it and skip the watercolors, but it will be paler and you run a bit more risk of staining if it spills).  And those inexpensive foam brushes will make very quick work of a whole page.  I have a few perfectionists I could never hand the teeny, tiny brush that comes with my watercolor set if I had any hope of getting out of my room in 30 minutes!

For my artic students, I have Articulation Raindrops that give me so many trials so, so easily.  These articulation activities are target specific (by phoneme and position), and have picture prompts with a handy word list in the corner for adults.  Grab the crayons!

I use the “dash” raindrops in a couple of ways.  Sometimes, those are for syllable practice.  Sometimes, those are for single words.  The large raindrop means we strive for just a bit more complexity.  That might mean it’s a single word attempt, or it might mean a carrier phrase like “it’s raining (picture)” or it might mean it’s time to make a sentence.

Kiddos use crayon to “dash” and color raindrops as we go.  They can work on the puddle jumping boy while I work with another student or when we’re done.  I set aside two minutes for them to “wash” the whole page in blue watercolor and we’re done!

For more info, click here.

Bonus:  To add some language targets to these articulation activities ask kiddos what would happen if it was raining (picture)? You’ll get some hysterical answers!

And for more fun, wet activities check out the Frenzied SLPs linky party!