We reviewed all the colors we have learned over the past few weeks for our 18th week of Tot School! When I decided to combine two of our color themes (black and white) into one, it left us with a empty week. I kept moving other weeks I had planned up, and finally decided we would do a color review theme to go over all the colors we have been learning, to fill in that empty week. Here’s how our week went.
We started off the week with a color sensory bin with an item for each of the colors we have learned so far. Grace played with this bin all week, and would hand us items for a specific color when asked, sometimes.
Our book of the week was Dog’s Colorful Day by Emma Dodd. If ever there was a perfect book for all the colors Grace has learned, this is it! It has every one of the colors in the book, and introduces counting. Grace loves dogs so this was an added bonus for her as well! Every time we read our book of the week, we would ask Grace to point out specific items and colors throughout the book, something we do with all the books we read. Usually Grace has no problem pointing to items we ask her to and most of the time surprises us with what she knows! This week was a bit different. I’m not sure if it was color overload since we were going over all the colors at one time, but Grace struggled a bit to point out colors. I’m not even sure if it was toddler stubbornness, indifference or boredom since we’ve already gone over these colors, because she has consistently been able to point out different colors and items on a weekly basis up until this week with no problem. But we persisted, and we could get some finger pointing out of her by the end of the week, but not the normal amount we have been used to seeing from her.
We enjoyed dancing to all of Pancake Manor’s Color YouTube videos as well as Story Bots’s Color Videos, and listened to Pancake Manor’s Colors album in the car all week long.
Our next activity of the week was stacking colorful nesting blocks into a large tower. I found this nice set of Melissa and Doug blocks on Amazon that not only included blocks of all the colors we have learned so far, but also has shapes, numbers, and animals for future lessons and activities. Grace was mesmerized the first time I opened up the box, and was so excited to stack up her tower and of course knock it down. She would clap and say “yay” every time she completed the tower!
She played with this little set all week long, and enjoyed nesting the boxes within each other a lot too. We would ask Grace to hand us color specific boxes which she enjoyed finding as well and praised her when she would hand us the correct color. These blocks are actually made of cardboard, but they are very sturdy and I believe they will last us a long time with minimal wear. Since all the blocks nest into each other they all fit back into the original box that also has a handle, which Grace enjoyed carrying around with her when we weren’t using them. This activity was Grace’s favorite by far for the week.
Our next activity did not go quite as planned. We attempted a color hunt, like a scavenger hunt, for items matching the Ziplock paintings Grace has done over the past 18 weeks. I set out about three different items per color around the living room that I had gathered from Grace’s toy collection and around the house. Then I put each one of Grace’s color Ziplock paintings in gallon sized Ziplock bags, left open. I brought Grace into the living room and showed her I was holding her red painting and to find red items…we started off great…she was super interested in a couple of items that were not red but did find the three red items and I held the bag open for her to place those items in the red bag. We did this for orange and so on, until after a few bags, Grace was no longer interested in finding the corresponding colors and was more interested in playing with items and running around the house…Ha! So we stopped. And while she took a little break, I set up the living room a bit differently.
I took out all the color paintings from their bags and laid them on the floor and put a coordinating colored item with each painting. Then I took the remaining items and put them all in our little storage bin and placed the bin on the floor. When I brought Grace back into the room, I told her to pick an item and match it to the correct color painting on the floor and showed her what I meant by taking an item from the storage bin and placing it where it belonged. Again, Grace was uninterested in doing this. I even decreased the amount of items we were using to one per color to see if that would help…it did not. She would actually just take one item and go along and tap it to each of the color paintings on the floor, and I would just say each color as she tapped. Even though this activity didn’t go as planned for us, it may turn out great for your little one(s), which is why I still wanted to share this activity. Also, reflecting on this week’s activities, I’m wondering if all the colors together at one time was a bit overwhelming for Grace. We’ve focused on these colors individually so far, and she is simply not used to seeing all of them at one time. If I were to do this week over again, I might have split up this particular activity over several days and focused on hunting a few colors each day instead of all at once, especially since she was able to do a few colors to start with before loosing interest. Something to think about if you want to try this color hunting activity out!
Our next activity for our Color Review themed week was a felt board relating to our book of the week. I picked up some different colored felt pieces in the colors mentioned in the book. I drew a dog outline with a black sharpie on white felt to match the dog on our book, and then cut out different sized spots from the other felt pieces. I grabbed the felt board we used during our bug week I had snagged from Target, and set everything out for Grace to play with. Without any instruction, she knew exactly what to do. Grace would take the different colored spots and place them on the white dog. Grace definitely recognized and connected with our book of the week here, regardless of what her response has been to some of our other activities. She would continue to take off the spots and place them back on the dog for a little bit until she was ready to move on. We played with this activity for the rest of the week as well.
Our last activity of the week was not super hands on for Grace, and a little different than I had planned as well. I had planned for weeks to take all of Grace’s Ziplock Color Paintings to an office supply store to laminate and bind them into a book for Grace to use to reference her colors in the future. Well we never made it to the office supply store. I used those paintings in our color hunt activity in the middle of our week, and towards the end of the week we just ran out of time between appointments and other fun things we did over the weekend. So I took those paintings and put them in page protectors I already had, and into an unused binder I had as well. Grace enjoyed flipping through the pages and seeing her work in the binder probably just as much as if they were actually bound into a book. This also allows us to add more stuff into the binder in the future. We are getting ready to start learning shapes, and I’m going to try and incorporate an activity that we can save to this binder as well. And because I had everything already it didn’t cost us a thing!
So that was our color review week! Regardless of some of the bumps along the way we still had lots of fun reviewing all of our past color themes and enjoyed reading Dog’s Colorful Day throughout the week! 🐶
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 