About Make a Rainbow
Make a Rainbow is a gentle, no-ads colours game for children aged 3 to 7. Blobs of paint sit in a tray along the bottom of the screen, and your child drops each colour onto its own stripe of the rainbow — red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet — to finish it and win a star. It starts kindly, with almost the whole rainbow already painted and just one stripe to fill in; as your child earns stars, more stripes go missing, until one day they paint the whole rainbow from scratch.
It was dreamed up by a small child who loves rainbows. Learning the colours — and the order they always come in — is one of the first patterns a young child spots in the world, from a real rainbow after the rain to the crayons in the box. Drop the wrong colour on a stripe and it gives a friendly wobble and hops back — there is no losing and no telling off, just a rainbow to finish and a little star when it is done.
How it works
- The rainbow shows at the top with one or more stripes missing (the pale, dotted ones).
- Find that colour in the paint tray and drop it onto its stripe. It paints in, bright and glossy.
- Right colour, right stripe? It sticks. Wrong stripe? A gentle wobble and it hops back — try again.
- Fill every stripe to finish the rainbow and win a star — then a brand-new one begins.
- Easy rainbows come first; as your child collects stars, more stripes are left blank until they build the whole rainbow.
How to play with your child
- Say the colours aloud. “That stripe is red… then orange… then yellow…” Naming them is the lesson.
- Look for real rainbows. After the rain, in a puddle of oil, through a garden hose — the colours are always in the same order.
- Talk about which comes next. “We’ve done red and orange — what colour comes after yellow?”
More from Tadpole Games
- Make a Cake — pop the ingredients into the bowl in the right order and bake a real cake.
- Fred Sort — put all sorts of everyday pictures in order, first to last.
- Tick or Fix — a daily phonics word puzzle for children aged 4 to 7.
