I LOVE exploring colors with preschoolers! They are always so excited for every activity, and it is something that they we can use every day for the rest of the year. It allows us to work on a variety of skills (such as observation and sorting skills) and we can also be scientists as we play with color mixing! It is just plain fun, all around. I hope that you'll share color ideas you may have in the comment section, and that you just might find some ideas here to use with your kiddos!
Warning: This is kind of a long post. But, if you are about to work on colors it should be worth it! It is organized by general color ideas starting at the top, and then a section for each color further down. I have numbered the activities, just for fun. Enjoy!
Warning: This is kind of a long post. But, if you are about to work on colors it should be worth it! It is organized by general color ideas starting at the top, and then a section for each color further down. I have numbered the activities, just for fun. Enjoy!
General Color Ideas!
1. Dress-up Fun
I do two weeks of color exploration. We have a new color each day, and I send home the color days in advance so kids can dress up! They enjoy this sooo much! Can you tell it is BLUE day?
2. Color Themed Meals
We guess what our "mystery snack" will be each morning, which the kids know will go with our daily color. Each child guesses. It is a fun game. I also try to get as many parts of our lunch to match the color, too. This is exciting because I typically work hard to get as many different colors into our lunches as possible. This is our ORANGE lunch.
3. Color Mixing: Two Primary Colors
I like to start off color mixing with just two of the primary colors. This helps the kids explore, but easily keep track of how they are mixing and making colors. This is a great outside activity so that the kids can be as messy as they want! And if you have a grass area-the grass gets some extra water too :) I enjoy using water pitchers with on-off spouts so that the kids can mix away at their own pace. All I have to do is make sure there is water in the jugs if it runs out. Lots of plastic cups, maybe some eye-droppers....hours of great science and color play!
4. Color Mixing: Red, Blue, and Yellow!
Offer them the third color, and let them explore and play to their hearts content :) I usually start my color weeks off with red, blue, and yellow so we can get to mixing right away. And also explore and talk about how to make our new colors as we study them.
5. Invitation to Play: Freight Train by Donald Crews
I wrote a whole post about this for my Connecting with Literature and Colors series. You can check it out HERE if you are interested.
This was a HUGE hit with my preschoolers. They made up their own trains/stories, used the book and tried to match the colors, and created all sorts of fun felt-board pictures.
6. Color Sorting/Exploration Activities
I had a bunch of color lines donated to my school. It happened that if I cut them up they fit perfectly into some containers I found at The Dollar Tree! And they were five to a pack. Great deal :) I set out a tray with all sorts of colorful objects from around the school and let the kids explore and play as they chose.
Counting bears encourage kids to explore color, but also invite them to explore measurement if you get the set that has different sizes. We already had these and they made a great color activity for our centers/work station time. The kids sorted them by color, put them in lines by color and size, and just had fun using them. I also saw some PATTERNS!
I also put out some noodle bins. I colored the noodles and then put out string and an assortment of containers with lids. This was a favorite! I just happily gave up the "noodles on the floor" mess, and let it go until the end of week. They did a great job picking up the large noodles without me even asking :)
7. Get Set For School Activity Books
I love the Get Set For School Curriculum, and I use it as I want throughout the year. In ways that work well with my own curriculum :) The color pages in there are great for color week. They have a page for every color, with three pictures, and then they work on shapes by adding a shape below each picture that looks similar to the object above. We can work on "coloring" versus "scribbling", on noticing a variety of different shades of a color, and on our "grip"/fine motor skills...I love them!
8. Learn about Rainbows!
You can sing a song to learn the order of the rainbow, and get in some science by talking about the sun and rain. It is also fun to bring out prisms or sun-catchers! When I sat down and talked about the order of the rainbow, and drew one step-by-step with my preschoolers...they took off and began making rainbows all week long on their own.
Inspiration by Color!
(the rest of the ideas are linked to a color)
9. RED: Apple Spice Play-dough
I make play-dough with the kids for color week each year. But our red dough was extra special because of THIS post by "It's Gravy, Baby!". Yumm! In my opinion, if you are going to make play-dough for kids, let them help! They enjoy it, and playing and exploring with it becomes so much more meaningful.
10. Invitation to Create: RED Sensory Tray
I used our Apple-spice dough in this sensory tray, which is set up as an Invitation to Create. The red apples, acorns, and leaves came from Michaels. I found the flowers and most of my containers at The Dollar Tree and use them for all sorts of activities.
11. RED Lunch Inspiration
Ideas: Red pasta sauce with fun noodles, salami, strawberries, and sliced red bell-peppers. We also had red apples and red cherries with our snacks. And our water jug had sliced strawberries in it!
We put fruit in our water daily, but this was especially fun for color week! I love this jug because the kids can get their own water all day long!
12. Bake Something BLUE
Again, preschoolers LOVE to help bake! We made blueberry muffins for blue day. And they were so excited to eat them because they all helped out in the baking process. This is also a great time to talk about ingredients and measuring!
Extra fun for the kids to help line the muffin tin with colored liners :) We used the extras for a blue counting activity while we waited for them to bake!
13. Invitation To Play: The Little Blue Truck
You can check out my post about setting up this Invitation to Play HERE.
14. Blue Food Inspiration
We enjoyed our blueberry muffins, blueberry yogurt, blue grapes, and some (naturally) blue baked potatoes! Of course, we had some plain blueberries with our snacks! The blue baked potatoes were a hit. The kids even wanted to eat the peel!
15. Yellow Leaf Collages
I already loved the book The Little Yellow Leaf. So, when I saw THIS idea from Buggy and Buddy I had to try it out. What I loved was how the kids could do this all on their own. And it was such good practice for their little fingers to punch holes, cut with scissors, and glue with glue-sticks. And it was cute and creative!
16. Yellow Food Inspiration
Corn, Bananas, Cheese and Crackers....and we tried steamed potstickers (our new food for the week) with soy/teriyaki sauce for dipping. They really enjoyed it! We also had fun tasting lemons and putting some in our water jug.
17. Connect to Your Community!
If you have a college nearby it might be fun to see if they want to donate something to your school for color week! We got some pom-poms and had fun playing with them outside! This gave us a chance to talk about sports, mascots, and the school that many of our parents work at :)
18. Invitation to Create: Green Sensory Bin
I grabbed some green stones from our sensory tub outside, some green leaves from my Fall stuff, made some green play-dough, and found some green buckets up in my bin of containers :) The mini leaves and apples came from Micheals Craft Store.
19. Plant GREEN Things To Eat!
This one depends on whether or not you have a garden space available. I am lucky enough to be able to garden with my kiddos each year and raise chickens...so we are out there planting things to eat in the Fall and the Spring! We brainstormed "green" Fall crops to plant for green day.
20. Invitation to Create: Orange Sensory Tray
The kids made pumpkin patches, used the objects to "stamp" into the dough and make impressions, they made bouquets, and all sorts of creative things!
21. Creative Drawing: The Big Orange Splot!
This is one of my personal favorites when it comes to children's books. The Big Orange Splot is by Author Daniel Pinkwater. There is just something about it. I always get chills when I see the kids faces as I show them all the last few pages in the book. A wonderful story about creativity and following your dreams, even if they are different than someone else's. And about inspiring others. I just can't get enough of it. I do this activity every year. You can read about it in depth HERE, as part of my Colors and Connecting to Literature series.
22. Orange Food Inspiration
A great Fall weather meal :) Grilled cheese with tomato soup, cut out Fall cheese, cantaloupe, and carrot sticks. Of course we had oranges for snack and in our water jug! The kids also LOVE scrabble letter cheese-ITS. While they are not my favorite snack to serve it is fun to build words with.
23. Draw with Harold and his Purple Crayon!
You can read my Connecting With Literature post about this project HERE! I wanted to give the kids a chance to do whole-body coloring...engaging all their muscles to reach up high, get down low, and work on creative coloring and pre-writing skills.
24. Explore Naturally Purple Food!
Cabbage, Potatoes, Onions, Beets, and Turnips...oh my!
The potatoes were especially pretty all washed and cleaned up. We cooked and mashed them for our lunch :)
25. Read Pinkalicious! and Bake
I try to stay away from sugars at preschool except on birthdays...but who says you have to make pink "cupcakes"?! My kiddos LOVE banana muffins, and their batter is easily pinkified. Another fun way to get the kids cooking their own food!
26. Pink Food Inspiration
Pink, like purple, is a little harder to find, unless you want candy or treats! But, we enjoyed some Strawberry yogurt, watermelon, "pink" muffins, and radishes with ranch.
Some Wrap-Up Activities
27. Invitation to Create with Mouse Paint!
This is a wonderful way to end a color study! It is hands-on, kid guided, and connected to a great children's book: Mouse Paint by Ellen Walsh. You can read about this in my Connecting With Literature: Colors series right HERE!
28. Paint your Nails Like a Rainbow!
My kiddos LOVED this :) We did it on a rainy afternoon when I happened to have a group of only four little girls. Although, many of my little boys love painting their nails too!
29. Eat a Rainbow of Foods!
For the last day of a color study it might be fun to try to eat all the colors of the rainbow at some point during the day. We had some colors for snack, and some for lunch :)
30. Make "permanent" Color Jars
We leave these containers in our windowsill all year long, and the kids can explore them whenever they want. It helps us remember our color-mixing all year!