Spinners and optical illusions are so much fun.
But how do they work?
Our eyes see images very very quickly but our brains have a hard job keeping up so our brains just assume that the spinning images are just one single image.
We spun leaves on trees in 3 different ways, spun spirals and watched our hands grow, and then spun different discs to make different colours. We were so impressed to see that blue and red make purple, red and yellow make orange and all 7 colours of the rainbow spin together to make white (we had guessed brown because that is the colour you get when you mix lots of paints or lots of play doh together).
Then in our own classes we made our own Christmas thaumatropes.
A big Thank You to Atlantic Technological university (ATU) for helping us to get involved in their excellent Rainbow Lab.
https://www.atu.ie/app/uploads/2025/11/rainbow-lab.pdf
