toddler school | red week

Copeland, our first born, has recently learned his colors and has a deep love for them.  He tells us the color of anything and everything and is so proud of himself when he does so.  I decided to embrace his current interest and start our toddler school with a 10 week color unit!

Keep in mind, our child is two… barely two… so each day consists of activities right now that are a more sensory, hands on, type of learning.  The best kind, honestly, because he doesn’t even realize we are learning.

And y’all… I am a planner.  My fellow teachers made fun of me for this, but yes, I have a lesson plan.  It’s much easier to do lesson planning when you don’t have standards you are having to input for every minute of your day!

So here is week one, all laid out for you.

Wk1 RED Lesson Plans – for a downloadable PDF, click HERE.

ALL ABOUT RED:

To really kick off the week and play up the color RED as much as I could, we started the week off with singing our RED song (I’ll be creating a blog post this week with links to our color word songs!) and wearing RED as much as we could.  Eisley even joined in on the fun, and sported a little RED dress.

PHOTO CREDIT: My amazing husband! =)

RICE SENSORY BIN:

Copeland loved helping dye the rice!  This is one activity that your toddler can easily help you with.  I used a recipe found in 150+ Screen-Free Activities For Kids.  Once we had our rice and dye in a Ziplock bag, Copeland had a blast swishing around the rice and watching it turn from white to red!  This does have some dry time involved with it… but with the aid of a fan, we were able to create our sensory bin in no time at all.

After the rice was dry, I added in some RED counting bears I had purchased in my graduate school years, as well as some RED shapes.  He loved digging out the bears to ‘count’ them.  We also used a shovel from his play camping set to add to the fun.

Rice Sensory Bin

After he played with the RED bears/shapes, we went on a toy hunt and found RED toys of his own that we could add to the rice.  This was MUCH more exciting for him!  He loved burying his cars/trucks/etc. in the rice and then finding them again.  (And yep… one lone blue toy made it into the bin.  What can I say?  He is two after all.  😉 You pick your battles.)

RED Toy Scavenger Hunt

*Friendly Advice*  Copeland and I discussed that the rice must stay on the blanket.  We had some close calls and had to revisit the conversation often… but in the end, it was an easy clean up as we just folded up the blanket and shook out all the rice in our backyard.  With a quick wash, the blanket was as good as new.  It did not stain in any way.  Also, if stored properly, the rice will keep for a very long time.  That means this activity can be used multiple times for only one simple prep.  Best of all worlds!

FILE FOLDER MATCHING GAME:

File Folder games are something I remember from my school days.  Truth be told, I rarely, if ever, used them in my Kindergarten classroom.  My love for them has not diminished though (nostalgia, maybe?) so I plan to have fun with them in my homeschooling adventures.

I saw this somewhere in the land of Pinterest, and re-created it, adding some of my own spin on it.The outside of the File Folder is the color word RED.  This is important in our journey of learning about RED. My goal for our color unit is not only increasing vocabulary and color recognition, but also letter recognition as well.  On the inside of the file folder, six pictures of red items are glued (and then laminated) so that Copeland can match pictures to their pair.  While we match pairs, he is working on his fine motor skills as well as his vocabulary and sentence structures.  The File Folder stays out all week and is accessible to Copeland at any time.  He likes to do it himself, but I challenge him once a day, and we do it together.

Click HERE for a PDF of this that you can print/color/laminate for yourself.

*I recorded a video of us doing the File Folder with the letter BLUE, so stay tuned next week to see exactly how I use this resource.  To check out BLUE week – click HERE.

*I laminated the File Folder at our local teacher supply store.  Much cheaper than an office supply store.  Our local store even has a day where all lamination is half off… and no, you don’t have to be a teacher to use their laminator or purchase from the store!*For ease of repeated use, I bought little velcro dots found in the office supply section of Walmart.  They are pretty inexpensive and I have had a love affair with them for many things over the past few years!

HOMEMADE PLAY-DOH:

Ok.  So true confession time.  I decided to try out a home-made EDIBLE play-doh recipe.  There are several recipes in the activity book I am using… and of course, you can find plenty on Pinterest.  Seemed like a great idea, especially for a two year old.  Somehow, somewhere along the way, I failed with the recipe.  It was greasy and overall just not a great consistency.  For the time it took (and major mess I made) I’ll stick with the store-bought stuff in the future.  Live and learn, right?!  Play-doh is a great way to also work on letters.  We made letters out of the dough to spell R-E-D! 🙂

Play-Doh Fun

READING, READING, READING:

Finally, we love books around here.  We read together multiple times a day.  Copeland has a great attention span, and a book lover at heart, so he happily sits in my lap as we read through many books at a time.  Even if you don’t have much time, I encourage everyone to read with their children at least once a day.  You may not think it is making a difference, but woah… does it ever!  If interested, I can point you to many articles and books explaining the science behind and importance of early childhood literacy.

Sometimes it is a stretch, but I find all the books I can that have to do with each color.  This was our stack of RED books.  Again, this is accessible to Copeland every day and at any time.

All of our RED books!

I have more color activities that I will weave throughout the 10 weeks and will post them as they arise.  Some days we get our activities done and some days we double-up because we simply didn’t do it for whatever reason the day before.  Other times it takes us two weeks to do one color, simply because life happens, like a stomach bug that goes through our entire house.  Being flexible is one of the greatest joys of teaching at home.

So there you go!  Week one of the Color Our World unit.  The Color Red.

Next up… BLUE week!