Color Week - Tot School

John is 19 months!

John and I are working on his colors. He is doing AWESOME at shapes and puzzles and is starting to even catch on to numbers. Colors, however, are not his strong suit. So I thought this week we would practice colors!

Color Cubes
I bought a bag of colored counting cubes in the dollar spot at Target. I was so excited when I saw them! (Nerd alert!!) John was interested in playing with the cubes- putting them in and out of the box, etc. So I let him do that for a little while. Then I put out a flash card for each color and tried to get him to put the cubes on corresponding cards. (yellow cubes on yellow card, etc.) I really had to help him with that and it was easier for me to starting sorting the cubes into piles and have him help me add more cubes to each pile instead of match a cube to the card. This was our first activity of the week so I was starting to get a tad worried that he might be a little color blind! haha!





**sidenote: I promise that I have shorts/pants for John! It seems most of the pictures I have for the activities he is only wearing a shirt and a diaper. Can I use the excuse that it is hot in Texas? Or how about by the time I get the diaper on he has kicked and twisted so much I don't even want to bother with shorts????**

Red Fish, Red Fish
I found this activity while searching online (sorry- forgot to mark the site so if this is from your blog, please feel free to claim it!!) The instructions for using a felt board were:

For this story you would put the red fish on the felt board and start with "Red Fish ... Red Fish ... What do you see?" "I see a Blue Fish looking at me" ... (put blue fish on board and take red one down) ..."Blue Fish... Blue Fish... What do you see?" I see a White Fish looking at me". (Put white fish up and take blue one down). You would continue until you have done all of the colors of the fish. When you are on the last color fish you would put up all the other fish and say "I see all of the different colored fish looking at me".

Well, loved the idea, but I am too cheap to go buy felt and too lazy to cut out all the different fish. So, I pulled up my handy dandy photoshop program and made different colored fish and printed them out. I would have copied them on cardstock OR laminated them, but I don't have cardstock or a laminating machine. So, they are on regular ol' computer paper and once John completely destroys them, I can always print out a new set!

(Here are my fish pages if you want to print them out! Just click on each of the three picture and save it.)






Since I didn't use the felt board, we sat by the fridge and used magnets to hang up each fish. The first two times I went through the story (well, I kind of sang it! haha!) John LOVED it! Then I got tired of re-clipping each fish so I would hand the fish to John (with a clip on it) and he hung it on the fridge and we just kept adding for each color. He really enjoyed this activity and I kept the fish on the fridge so he could continue playing with them for the next couple days. I will definitely have to do more fridge activities with him!





Matching Fish Game
One thing that has been frustrating me with teaching John colors up until now is all the books I have will show different pictures to teach colors. For example, it might have a brown horse, an orange pumpkin, and a red apple. So if I ask John 'which one is red?' I think he is looking for some object that is named 'red'. As in 'red' is a noun, not describing something. Does that make sense?! :)

So, I actually printed two copies of the fish I made and turned it into a matching game. I liked that each picture was the same (all fish) so he really had to focus on the colors instead of the shapes. First I only put a couple colors for him to match and then used all the colors at once. He actually did REALLY well with this. I was so excited because he was able to distinguish between different colors! (and I guess this proved he wasn't color blind. haha!). The ones that were more challenging for him were matching the red vs pink and black vs brown. They were pretty close in color so I think that is hard for him being young.






**love the milk all in his mouth in this picture!**

Color Collage
We had an arts and crafts activity where John glued torn pieces of construction paper to make his artwork. He LOVED using the glue bottle even though he didn't know how to squeeze out the glue. I would hand him a piece of construction paper so he could glue it down and sometimes he would try to sort them by color on his own! How cute is that?!



Other Activities we did:
1. played with different color play doh
2. read "Blue Hat, Green Hat" by Sandra Boyton

Slowly but surely John is getting better with his colors! :)