Tot School: Learning Our Colors- Red and Orange

Welcome to the Learning Our Colors Series!  Each week for the next few weeks we will be focusing on two colors.  This week we are learning about red and orange, next week will be blue and purple, then yellow and green, and finally brown, white, and black, with a wrap up week at the end.  Each color will have sensory, fine motor, and craft activities, as well as reading and a culminating page for a book.  Some of the ideas for this week came from Play Create Explore

To begin the week, we went on a red hunt, looking for red objects.

Our collection of red objects.

Then we did a series of activities with the color red.  One day we went rock collecting, then painted the rocks red, added googley eyes, and painted black dots to make ladybugs!

Painting the rocks red.

Adding those black dots.

Look at our cute ladybugs!

We spent time reading books.  We read many books about colors.  Two of Little Guy's favorite books were Pete the Cat: I Love My White Shoes by Eric Litwin and One Red Dot, a pop-up book by David A. Carter. We read One Red Dot multiple times each day to see the wonderful pop-up creations!  Little Guy quickly became an expert at finding the red dot on each page!

Each week we are working on fine motor activities as well.  Using the red pasta wheels, Little Guy was working to fill in a rectangle.  The rectangle is covered with sticky paper. 

However, he quickly lost interest in that activity, so we decided to stick his red collection to the sticky paper instead.

They all stick!

 As a culminating activity for each color, we will make a page to go into a color book.  For red, Little Guy made an apple, filled in with little squares of paper.  He cut the paper into strips, then cut the strips into squares before gluing them on.

Little Guy's red apple page.

Some other things we did with the color red are:

• We wore red shirts during the week.
• We played with our red pasta wheel sensory bin.
• We cut an apple in half and did apple stamping with paint.
• We made some new red Kool Aid scented playdough.
• We ate red food, including apples and tomatoes.

About halfway through the week, we started learning about the color orange, so we went on an orange object hunt.

Our orange collection.

We had a snack of orange Jell-O!

My Jell-O can jiggle!

As a fine motor and sensory activity, we made a sand tray with orange paper on the bottom.

Shaking the salt around.

Wow!  Look at me draw in the sand.

We also played with orange shaving cream!

My hands are orange!

Our culminating activity was to make a fish.  We used orange craft foam.  This turned out to be too hard for Little Guy to cut, so I ended up cutting the squares.  We smeared white glue all over the fish to make sure that the squares would stay.

Little Guy's orange fish page.

Some other things we did with the color orange are:

• We wore orange shirts, or shirts that had orange on them, during the week.
• We ate orange food, including oranges, Jell-O, and carrots.
• We drank out of an orange cup.
• We identified lots of orange at a trip to Home Depot!