Wednesday, September 4, 2013

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!

Saturday, August 31, 2013

Blue Day

As I have mentioned in previous posts, one thing I am working on with Little Guy is colors.  I was inspired by a series of posts on Play Create Explore that focus on a color of the week.  While I was not quite ready to dedicate an entire week to each color, I though about what activities I could do in a day to practice a color. 

The first color we practiced was blue.  Our blue activities included making blue scented rice for a new sensory bin, painting with blue paint, using blue markers, wearing the color blue, and playing with blue play dough.

We made blue rice, using this recipe from Growing a Jeweled Rose and blue Kool Aid!  We had a lot of fun with it!


Since Little Guy had still been enjoying airplanes, I thought we would paint some.  I have these large plastic stencils that we used.

We started out using s sponge...

but it soon got on our hands!

Finger painting!

Our finished art.

What I learned was that there was too much for just one day!  We did this back in July (sorry it's late!), but did not get everything done that I wanted!  (We never even got out the play dough and I had a few more ideas that I did not even mention.)  After some reflection on my goals for Little Guy, we will do a couple of colors a week.  Stay tuned for more color activities!

Wednesday, August 28, 2013

4 great reasons to dye pasta wheels

I love using Kool Aid to dye stuff. I've used it to dye and scent rice and playdough. I was in need of a new sensory idea for the color red, so I let Little Guy pick some pasta from the bulk bins at the grocery store. He chose little wagon wheels.
We divided it into 4 groups and used Kool Aid packets and water. We set them in a bin and put it outside to dry (which didn't take too long in the heat).

Helping Mommy shake it up!

Are you going to help?
The one problem we had was that the noodles dried all stuck together, so we had to spend some time breaking it apart.

Our bin, complete with red tools.

Now for the reasons that you should dye past wheels:

1. It smells yummy!
2. It looks fun to play in. The pasta is not dyed uniformly, giving it a neat look.
3. It is a fun sensory bin.  It's great for scooping, pouring, and hiding your hand in!
4. It doubles as a fine motor activity. Little Guy had a blast threading them on the bamboo skewers.

Adding the wheels so carefully!

Look at that stack.

What have you dyed with Kool Aid?

Monday, August 26, 2013

Bubbles

Little Guy loves to blow bubbles. On a recent trip to the dollar store, we picked up a new bubble blowing kit.  Little Guy loved it! An added bonus was that he was much more successful at blowing bubbles out of these big wands than he usually is with the regular wands!





What great finds have you made at the dollar store?