Category: Color Themes

Animals / Chicks / Color Review / Tot School / Uncategorized

Tot School: Chick theme

Kent was 21 months old. I found so many cute chick activities while searching for Easter ideas!  We raise a couple hundred chickens a year here, plus we have some laying hens wandering around.  Our first batch of day-old chicks arrived on April 5th.  We learned all about chicks and chickens that week! I picked up this cool life cycle of a chicken set at the Chippewa Nature Center.  We used it as the basis for the week’s activities.  I put some white, yellow, and orange feathers in his sensory bin.  At first I added only the nest and eggs figurine.  We talked about eggs and decorated an egg coloring page. Each day I added another figurine and talked to him about what it was.  Then we laid out each day’s coloring picture and matched up them up with the figurines.  We colored a hen on the fourth day and a rooster on the fifth day, even though the set only has one adult bird.  He recognized rooster, hen, etc. when we used those words but I explained that the rooster is the daddy, the hen is the mama, and the chick is the baby.  That made a big impression

Continue reading
Color Themes / Gray / Tot School

Tot School: Gray

Kent was 20 months old. Well… this will give me a chance to catch up on these posts.  We hardly did anything for gray week!  Or, maybe we did, but it’s all a blur and I didn’t take any pictures.  Brian was off work for awhile with a wrist problem and I think gray week fell on his first week home.  It was a hard adjustment for us (mostly me, I admit it!) but in the end we made a lot of good memories and were sad to have him go back to work.  We just didn’t make any memories about the color gray, apparently. I was able to snap a couple pictures of some materials we used, and I can share some of the projects I’d had in mind… I think we had some elephant books from the library but, alas, no pictures of those either.  We used his Melissa & Doug Safari animals puzzle as our puzzle of the week. Other ideas I had in mind that didn’t come to fruit this time: Sing and dance to “The Old Gray Mare” (available on YouTube) Make an elephant mask out of a paper plate (lots of tutorials available online)

Continue reading
Brown / Color Themes / Tot School

Tot School: Brown

Kent was 20 months old. I spent a lot more time planning Brown week and it paid off.  There was a bit of frustration on my part when he didn’t want to do some of the activities but I adjusted and we had fun. We did the matching cards a couple times.  This was our first time using them so he didn’t quite “get it” enough to find both parts.  Instead, I laid them all out, already matched, and had him pick out the animals by name and then pick up both parts and put them in the pocket.  This worked well and was a good way to practice his language skills. The yellow basket, aka color bin, was taken around the house and filled with random brown objects.  We have a coonskin cap from his Grandpa Larry and Kent enjoyed petting them and playing with it a little bit. I’ll do a separate post of the paper plate craft. This was by far our best week yet.  Stay tuned for our St. Patrick’s themed week which was even better.  What has been your favorite theme or activity when working with your children? This post is linked to: Tot School

Continue reading
Color Review / Color Themes / Purple / Tot School

Tot School: January (Purple and Color Review)

Kent was 18 months old. We kind of wandered through January.  I tried to rotate the tot trays so that he had fun stuff to play with but I didn’t do a lot of planning or set any real goals.  We spent some time on the color purple. At some point I realized that even though we’d covered most of the colors I still wasn’t really sure if Kent knew and recognized them.  There was a time when he would accurately point the “the red ball” or the “green tree” in his books, but other times that he would point to something else.  So, we did some fun color review activities.  After working through them I could tell that he did recognize most colors, with normal errors and confusion over similar colors.  It’s just good to know where we’re at. Where are you at with learning colors?  What are your favorite color activities?

Continue reading