Magic Play-dough

Magic Play-dough

Materials:
Basic Play-dough Recipe:

1 ½ cups flour
- ¾ cup salt
- 1 tablespoon cream of tartar
- 3 tablespoons vegetable oil
- 1 ½ cup water
- Wooden spoon
- 2 medium sized bowls
Red, yellow and blue food coloring. Or powder paint.

Ideas:
Make up the play-dough.
Divide the play-dough into six balls.
In the middle of each ball, hide some food coloring or powder paint (two balls of each color).
First give them the yellow ball and red ball. As they play, the colors will appear and will appear to form orange
Later combine red and blue to make purple.
Combine blue and yellow to make green.
All the balls combined will form brown.

Good For:
Color Recognition,
Recognizing same and Different,
Recognizing changes,
Fine Motor skills.

Place play-dough in a plastic container or ziplock bag and refridgerate to make it last longer.

Activity found from the Play-Activities.com E-mail Newsletter.

Frozen Shapes

I receive an E-mail newsletter from, Play-Activities.com where I saw this idea. I thought it would be neat to try so I’m posting it.


Frozen Water Shapes

Materials:
Various size balloons
Food coloring
Eye droppers
Large container for water play


Preparation:
1. Select different shaped balloons
2. Fill with water
3. Put in freezer for a few days
4. After they are frozen solid- cut away the balloon, leaving the shape.

Ideas:
Put the ice shapes into the large container. ( baby bath, paddling pool or water table)
Allow them to drop the food colouring onto the ice and watch the colors change.

Good For:
Hand - Eye Coordination
Experimentation
Creativity

You could also do this with different shaped ice cube trays.

Fall Colors Lesson Plan

Art:
Fall Color collage
Use construction paper or card stock as the background where the kids can glue different colored materials. For fall colors, use orange, green, red and yellow. The materials can be anything you can find around the house.
Paper,
Felt,
Other fabric,
Pictures of things like pumpkins, apples, leaves etc,
Pompoms,
Leaves
And whatever else you can think of for fall.

Coloring Pages:
Here are some fall theme coloring pages that I found.
Basket of apples,

fall leaves,
or
acorns.


Literacy:
Make a fall colors book.
Fall Colors Book

Sensory Play:
Fill a tub with fall colored pompoms, plastic apples, plastic pumpkins, acorns, leaves etc along with some cups and scoops.
There are a lot of good ideas for sensory tubs out there.
Autumn Sensory Tub
from School Time Adventures.
Autumn Sensory Bin
from 1Plus1Plus1.

Play-dough:
Pumpkin Pie Recipe
Play-dough Recipe
Add apple spices and food coloring.

Movement:
Take a nature walk.
Talk about the colors you see.
The leaves changing,
Fallen leaves and acorns,
Dark clouds,
Talk about other things you see, smell, hear and feel.

Math:
Take a platter or tray with dividers.
Cut pieces of red, green, yellow and brown construction paper and tape them inside the tray.
Have the children sort objects by color such as leaves, acorns, pumpkins, apples, etc. Basically, you can use any objects that are the colors you want them to recognize.

Matching:
Fall Colors Matching

Fall Colored Snacks or additions to Meals:
Red: Apple, strawberries or anything with tomato sauce.
Orange: orange slices, pumpkin, carrots.
Yellow: Corn, pineapple, bananas, cheese.
Green: Grapes, apple, Broccoli, celery.
Blue: Blueberries.
Brown: Wheat bread, whole wheat oat meal, brown rice, chocolate.
Idea inspired by the following post from: Counting Coconuts.

Fall Colors Matching

Here’s a fall matching activity for color recognition. I only used five colors, but I’ll do some different activities as the seasons change and use the other colors for those. You match the colored shape with the same colored object. I’m using this as one of the activities in my fall colors lesson plan which will be posted either tomorrow or Saturday.

Brown

Green

orange

Red

Yellow

All images can be found on Google Images and are clipart.

Matching Fun with Egg Cartons

This is a little game I came up with around Easter, but this can be good all year round. You can use it for Easter, food, farming or any other theme you can relate to eggs. Even if you aren’t doing anything with eggs, it’s useful for color recognition for toddlers and even some preschoolers who aren’t sure of their colors. I only had one package of the plastic Easter eggs for this activity, but you can buy other packages that may have more colors. I took the eggs apart, put one set of halves in the carton and left the rest out so the kids could put the same colored halves together. This of course makes the whole dozen eggs. For a better color variety, you could buy different colored large marbles or balls and color or paint the cups of the carton. That way you wouldn’t have to use the same color twice.


For preschoolers, you can write numbers 1 through 12 on the eggs and then write the numbers 1 through 12 on the egg carton for practice with number recognition. The preschoolers I’ve worked with have had to do this several times before they could do it on their own. The first couple of times were spent just looking at the numbers and then they understood that the numbers matched on the carton. This works well with doing a variety of other sorting and matching activities so the concept of numbers and counting sink in.