Color Containers

Again, I'm a teacher at heart, which means....I'm cheap :)

I'm forever going to Lakeshore Learning (a teacher-ish store) and getting ideas just to come home and do it my own way.  Adelyn just turned 2 which means she's into the world of colors.  Here's an idea I got at Lakeshore and perfected at home when Charlotte was 2.  I'm doing it again right now with Adelyn.

First - spend a week or two keeping and washing out old plastic containers (sour cream, cottage cheese, hummus, etc).  If you don't have any paint on hand, buy some easy acrylic paint from Walmart or Michaels (99 cents at most)

Re-purpose old plastic containers with acrylic paint 

Start with one color or two colors that are VERY different.  I chose purple and yellow because Adelyn loves yellow and purple looks quite different.  Paint the containers, let them dry & write the color on the top with Sharpie.

Next is the fun part :)  SCAVENGER HUNT!  Kids of all ages love scavenger hunts.  It's how I've taught Charlotte letters, numbers, colors, shapes, etc.  Take your two (or you could start with just 1) container and search your house for things that are that color.  You want to stick to things that are mostly or completely that color.  

Our finds: Mr. Potato-head pieces, kitchen pieces, hair bows, bracelets, beads, etc.

Two colored containers filled

Put the lids on and you're done for now!  Leave them out in the open so that they play with the containers and the contents regularly.  Be sure to say those two colors over and over again as you see them over the next few days.  I like to remind the girls to "show Daddy" anything new at night so that they review and Daddy knows what we're doing during the day (win-win).

Here's the hard part - wait....

We tend to get excited and overdo it sometimes, trying to teach our kids 100 things at a time. 

Resist the temptation.  

Give it a week or so to marinate in their brains and refer to and play with the containers and colors regularly.

Adelyn finding red beads

Then, pick a completely different color and scavenger hunt again!

People think that colors are really concrete, but truly they are a really abstract idea.  There are tons of shades of red, shades of pink, etc that we don't think about.  Scavenger hunting allows our kids to find examples and non-examples of each color.  Beware of doing close-colors together.

The girls finding red hair bows

Notice in this video that Adelyn struggles with differentiating between orange and red.  This is perfectly common and expected.  These are really close colors and depending on the shade can look really similar.  She is also finding "nonexamples" of red and putting them to the side.

The sorting activities I'll share below really help kids learn to differentiate between these.  I'll probably do green next to separate orange from red.

Lastly, after doing a few containers, you can dump them all into a big pile and "sort" them into containers.  The girls really like this, but it's also fun for me to sort and make pretend-mistakes. This is a really common strategy that I used in the classroom and kids find it particularly funny :) and therefore really engaging.  Notice how engaged both girls are in this simply because I'm making mistakes.

Every time you add a new color, you repeat any/all of these activities.  Again - you'll want to wait.  Resist the temptation to move too quickly.  It will probably takes months for us to "finish" our color containers.

Calendar time

I'm a teacher.  I really can't help it.  It's just who I am.  I love learning whether it's math-related or not.  I love the real-life, relatable kind of learning! One of the many reasons I decided to stay at home full time with my kiddos was to impact those learning-packed first 5 years of life. I think we all want this, really.  So, as a teacher - I feel the need to share everything so other Mommas can steal ideas if they want :)

Charlotte is 3 1/2 and we've begun to realize that she doesn't have a really good grasp of time as far as days of the week, etc.  Calendars are a great thing for young kids, so I headed to Lakeshore Learning and got this heavy-duty calendar.  You could totally make one yourself, but I'm thinking this is going to be something we use for a long time in our house, so I decided to buy one that will last. I hung it on our front door (metal) with 3 heavy-duty clips.

We've been working on moving our "today" marker each day and counting the days, saying the day of the week, etc.  Charlotte especially likes seeing the different colored days for the weekends so she knows when Daddy gets to stay home all day with us!  We're just starting so I'm keeping it kind of simple this first month, but we've put a marker on "Vacation" and one this week to show when we're going to a friend's house.  We've worked on counting to see how many days there are until vacation.  This is an early math skill (to learn not to count today but to count "jumps" forward).

Another big reason I thought a calendar would be great is that Charlotte has mastered numbers 1-10 and most of her 11-20 numbers, but not all of them.  A calendar is a great way to work on numbers 1-31 in a really natural way :)

After we figured out what day it was today (the 14th) we used an empty glass container (this is an empty bouillon container).  Glass works well because you can see through it.  We spent awhile just counting 14 things into the container over and over again.  I wrote 14 on the container with a vis-a-vis pen (wet erase) marker so we can change the number each day.

everyone is counting 14 goldfish

We've filled it with 14 pretzels

14 berry kix

Here is Charlotte counting 14 fruit snacks

After our 14 container, the girls just did some counting.  Here's a video of Charlotte counting.  She omits 15 and 20 (which is totally normal).  She also doesn't get to "30" but instead uses a pattern to count to "twenty-ten" and beyond.  This is really common and exactly why we're doing this daily counting :)

For anyone with more than 1 kid, obviously any learning has to be differentiated so that both ages are learning something.  It was easier when I just had to think about what Charlotte was learning.  Adelyn is jumping right into the counting.  She just turned 2 last week.  What am I working on with her?  We're learning to count (1-10 will be our focus) and one-to-one correspondence.  This is when you point to 1 thing for every 1 number you say.  Charlotte has mastered this, but Adelyn will hopefully be learning this through our calendar time :)

This is all adapted from the idea of calendar math, which is used in preschools and elementary schools. It's something that is SO easy to do at home and calendars can a skill that can be adapted to a variety of ages.  You can add your family's events, etc so everyone is involved!