Week 2 of Tot School we focused on the color orange!

Our book for the week was It’s an Orange Aardvark by Michael Hall. If you or your child loves Eric Carle books then this is a must for your collection! Again Grace handed this book to me every time she could get her hands on it to read and loved poking her little fingers through the holes in the pages!

We also danced to Pancake Manor’s Orange video on YouTube as well as Story Bots’ Orange video on YouTube through out the week.

I made a color texture card out of items I had in my craft closet on some brown card stock. She loves feeling different textures and tries her hardest to pull the items off.

The first activity of the week was an orange sensory bin made from various toys and items found in her room and around the house. Grace loved playing with all the things in her Bin, taking them out and putting them back in. She played with this bin throughout the week as well.

For our next activity, we Ziplock painted an orange fish! I just placed a piece of white card stock that I had drawn a fish outline on with a sharpie into a gallon size Ziplock bag, added a few drops of orange paint inside the bag, then sealed it up. Grace then pressed and slapped and moved the paint around without all the mess from actual finger painting! At some point we will be ready for all the messy goodness of real finger painting, but for now since Grace still likes to put things in her mouth, this is our go to way of using her Crayola Kid’s paint!

Our third activity of the week was supposed to be threading orange pumpkins onto green pipe cleaners (pumpkin vines). In reality it was more of her de-threading the pumpkins from their vines. She isn’t quite there yet with threading…I mean it was the first time I had even introduced that concept to her…but she knew very quickly she could pull them off, so I kept threading and she kept “picking pumpkins”. All I did to set this up was cut out pumpkin shapes from orange foam, punched a hole in them, hot glued little pieces of curled pipe cleaner as stems (probably unnecessary), then pulled a green pipe cleaner through the holes of several pumpkins.

Our next activity for the week was a messy one, but so much fun and loved by miss Grace! We did some orange stamping with taste safe finger paint! I laid out a big piece of cardboard like paper, cut a mandarin orange in half, and made the finger paint by adding a few drops of orange food coloring to plain Greek yogurt! I showed her what to do by picking up a mandarin halve, dipping it in the “paint” and stamping it on the paper several times. She caught on very quickly and was stamping away. She could eat every part of this activity and she definitely did! She also was covered in our Greek yogurt paint and mandarin orange juice by the end so make sure you are prepared to give a bath after this activity! It was totally worth the mess for how much she loved this activity!

Our final activity of the week was a color sensory bath. I colored the bath water with Crayola bath drops then added all the items from her color sensory bin that could go in the bath tub and the splashing and playing commenced!

That’s the end of Orange week! 🧡 We had so much fun! At the end of the week, Grace could hand us the correct color ball when asked to hand over either the red or orange ball. I’d say that’s progress! Just remember every child learns differently and at their own pace! What has worked for us may not work well for your child and their needs. Any of these activities can be tweaked to whatever supplies you have on hand or to what your child personally likes.

If you’d like to see a sample of how I plan out themes for a week check out the Tot School Schedule 🍍 page!

You can also check out a list of this year’s themes on the Tot School Themes ☂️ page!

EVERYDAY a little Grace 🌷