It’s so important for students to know their colors and color words by the time they enter kindergarten. Here are 5 activities on how to teach kids colors.
Read Books
Kids love reading and listening to books. What better way to learn colors and color words than to read a book? Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? is one of my all time favorite book to use to review colors. Students love the repetition of the book and it’s super easy for students to pick up.
Pete the Cat: I Love My White Shoes by Eric Litwin, and Bear Sees Colors by Karma Wilson are also two great books to add to your reading list. In the Pete the Cat story, Pete’s white shoes change colors as he walks around. In the Bear Sees Colors book, the bear is walking through the forest and sees many different colors all around him. Students get hints of future colors, and it is a great way to get kids to interact with the book.
If you want to focus on a few colors at a time, Green by Laura Vaccaro Seeger and Blue also by Laura Vaccaro Seeger is another must have book to add to your reading list. If your students are more advanced, you can select books about mixing colors. Mix it Up! by Herve Tullet and Mouse Paint by Ellen Stoll Walsh are my two favorite books to read to my class.
Sensory Bins (color matching)
Sensory bins have really taken off in the last few years. There are so many activities you can do with a sensory bin. The first step is to purchase a sensory bin if you don’t have one for your child or class. I first started off by using two containers. To keep the mess at a minimum, I purchased a big container and then a smaller container to put inside the bigger container.
After some time, I splurged and purchased a Flisat Children’s Table from Ikea. The Flisat Children’s Table is amazing! There are so many things you can do with the Flisat table. What’s great is you can buy different type of bins to meet your needs. I purchased four small ones, two normal bins, and one deep bin for water.
What I use for my sensory bin filler depends on the lesson. I’ve seen Kix cereal, pasta, rice, beans, sand, dirt, water, and water beads to name a few.
For my color bins, I used Rigatoni. I placed a box of Rigatoni in a ZipLock baggie, then added a small amount of rubbing alcohol and food coloring. Once I had my four colors, I found matching colored items, sorting bears, sorting food, and stacking colored cups were a few items that I used. I placed all the items in a bag, I had my son sort the objects to the matching colored bins.
One item that I recently purchased from Amazon is the Legato Counting and Sorting Bears Activity My son loves to sort the bears into the cups using the tweezers. He can spend hours sorting the bears into the cups, stacking the cups, and sorting the bears into the sensory bins as well.
Flash Cards
In my classroom, I always had a few extra minutes here or there that I needed to fill. One of the ways I filled that time was to review with flash cards. For the most part, kids like flash cards. Color flash cards can focus on just the color, just the color word, or both. I like to use the color flash cards using the picture and the word unless the student is really struggling with recognizing the color word. Flash cards are easy to make. It doesn’t take much time to write the word and glue a picture on an index card. If you would like to save time, I have color flash cards for sale in my Teachers Pay Teachers store.
Games
Pop the Pig is a great game for younger kids just learning their colors and numbers. Players roll the die and pick the matching hamburger color to feed the pig. One game my class always loves is the Color and Shapes Bingo game. It’s a great game for students to focus on listening to directions and recognizing shapes and colors. One game that I like to use for literacy centers is a color matching game. I have the students take the color flash cards and place them face down. Students take turns finding matches to their colored cards until all cards are gone.
Color Books
A great way for students to work on either their colors or color words are color books for toddlers, preschool, or kindergarten. Every week I focus on one of the eleven colors. I have 4 sight word books for every color. Each color sight word book focuses on a certain color and sight words. Students trace color words and sight words for every page of the printable color book.
Interested in color books for your child or class? Try mine for FREE. Click here to sign up and download your free 4 color sight word books today!
If you’re looking for the complete set of all 97 color sight word books in color and in black and white, you can find them here and save 30% when you buy the bundle over buying them individually.
Bonus
A few other items that I use in my classroom to teach colors are color posters and color songs. I always find it helpful to have color posters up on display for students to look back to if they need help. I also always use desk name plates with the colors on it too. It really helps during independent work. During Calendar time, we sing Color Farm by Dr. Jean. It’s a song set to the tune of Bingo. I usually will type up the lyrics for students to follow along with. Jack Hartmann has quite a few songs focusing on the colors. Rock Your Body to the Colors is one of my favorites. Students get to dance to the colors.
Back to School time is a great time to review colors in the classroom. If you are looking for some read aloud book titles for your classroom, read my blog post all about my favorite back to school read aloud books.
Save these Coloring Activities for Later
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