Week 13 of Tot School was a super busy one for us but we managed to still have lots of fun exploring the color brown!
We started out our brown themed week with the book, Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? by Bill Martin Jr. (illustrated by Eric Carle). This book was a super simple read and awesome for helping reenforce our past colors! The end of the book lists all the different colored animals in the story which is where Grace would point to whichever color and animal I would say! She could do this the very first day we started reading this book. There was a little hesitation on the colors we hadn’t covered yet, but by the end of the week, she could identify every color when asked! So cool to see! I did change the wording on one of the pages just for Grace’s sake, instead of “goldfish” I would say “orange fish” since we covered the color orange already, and I didn’t want to confuse her. This book literally has every color we have learned over the past weeks, except for pink, and include two upcoming colors, black and white.
We didn’t have any color videos to dance to for our brown themed week but we did watch an episode of Netflix’s Word Party called The Color Monster throughout the week, which focused on 4 different colors including the color brown. Word Party has been a favorite of Grace’s for a long time. For a while, it was the only show that would hold her attention and calm her down. There are a lot of opportunities throughout this series’ short episodes for Grace to dance, and she loves to get her silly dance on while watching!
I had also made a brown color texture card from items found in my craft closet and around the house. I just hot glued items to a piece of card board then clip it to a small clipboard to make it a little more sturdy for Grace to play with. She loves to explore different textures, so I have made one of these for all our color themes.
Our first activity of the week was our traditional color sensory bin that we do for each of our color weeks! I just found all the brown items I could from Grace’s toy collection and items found around the house and placed them all in a small brown basket for Grace to play with throughout the week. I included a brown bag in the basket, and Grace really enjoyed placing all her brown items in the bag and dumping them out.
Our second activity of the week was Ziplock Painting a brown monkey! I just drew an outline of a monkey’s face on a piece of white card stock (there are plenty of printables out there if you prefer) with a black sharpie, placed it in a gallon sized Ziplock bag, added some brown paint on top of the card stock, sealed the bag, and handed it over to Grace. She made quick work of painting her monkey this time and there was lots of squeezing and waving the bag as well, which of course is ok because the paint can’t escape the bag! Unless of course she figures out how to unzip the bag at some point! We will cross that bridge when we get there…ha! A little note on brown paint, I actually had to make the brown paint for this activity because our box of Crayola Kid’s Paint does not include the color brown. I just combined red paint and green paint (complimentary colors) to make our paint, so don’t go buy brown paint if you have these colors already!
Grace’s brown monkey hung on the refrigerator for the rest of the week and once we finish all our colors, I will take her Ziplock paintings to a local office supply store to laminate and bind so Grace has a color book she made to reference all her colors.
Our next activity for the week was waiter painting a brown bear! Another almost mess free activity, with a little water…my little water bug’s favorite activity is any thing involving water! Again, I drew an outline with a black sharpie somewhat resembling the brown bear from our book of the week on a piece of brown card stock. You can certainly use construction paper, it will yield the same results! I usually place the paper in our little cookie sheet we use all the time to help contain the water used. Then I set out a small cup of water and a sponge brush and Grace started painting. The paper turns a different shade of brown when water is applied and Grace not only dips the brush in the water to paint, she also dips her fingers in the water to paint as well. As soon as the whole piece of card stock was saturated she quickly removed it, tossed it to the floor and began splashing in the cookie sheet!
Our next activity for our brown themed week was potato stamping with chocolate pudding! Definitely our messiest activity of the week! I picked up a small baking potato on a grocery run, as well as some chocolate pudding cups. I dumped one of the pudding cups on a plate and cut the potato in half. I laid out a piece of card board on our surface and showed Grace what to do. She took the potato halves and stamped away with the pudding until she was brave enough to try some she had got on her fingers. Once she did, it was all about dipping her fingers in the pudding and eating it instead of stamping! I just knew she would try to eat the potato, but to my surprise she didn’t! She stuck with what obviously worked and tasted good…ha!
Our last activity of the week wasn’t really an activity, but I don’t think Grace minded too much! We had a very busy Memorial Day weekend with not much time for other activities, so I made a batch of Cinnamon Spice muffins I had in the cabinet, and Grace enjoyed her brown muffins for breakfast over the weekend! In addition to being super yummy and smelling amazing, Grace made sure to turn it into a total sensory experience by crumbling the muffin with her hands while eating!
So that was our brown week! 🐻
We hope everyone had a wonderful Memorial Day weekend remembering those who made the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom! 🇺🇸
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 see a list of this year’s themes on the Tot School Themes ☂️ page!
EVERYDAY a little Grace 🌷
Everyday a Little Grace 