Baby School - Colors Theme

Baby H is 13 months old.  Although I try to always point out colors to H as we're playing, I thought I'd try a 'colors theme' for Baby School this week and focus on activities that will help him with color recognition.  I don't want my baby to learn things by staring at flashcards, but rather by touching, playing, and experiencing the world around him.  So that's what we did...



Ball Pit

 I threw a bunch of colored plastic balls into H's playpen for a fun ball pit sensory experience.  He really enjoyed throwing and kicking the balls around.  I put an empty crate just outside his playpen and one of the games we played (which I didn't get a picture of) involved dropping the balls into the crate.  As H threw each ball, I named it's color.  I would also ask him to get me a certain color ball and he didn't get the correct ball all the time, but he was right more than random probability so I think he's getting it. 

Cookie Cutter Sensory Bin

 

Another fun sensory experience this week was playing with a container full of plastic cookie cutters in different shapes and colors.  H would dump it out and then put all the cookie cutters back in the container.  His older sisters had fun with this sensory bin, too, and they all spent a lot of time playing side-by-side.

Color Sorting

H is only 13 months old, so he's a bit young for sorting tasks.  However, I don't think he's too young to look at groups of objects and identify what quality they have in common.  A lot of the times that we spent freely playing this week, I sorted his toys by color or matched up two toys that were the same color to see if he would make some observations about what I was doing.  This baby absorbs new information like a sponge, so I'm sure it's been filed in his brain somewhere.

Hand Eye Coordination

One of H's favorite toys right now is this ball pounding tower.  It's a good hand-eye-coordination task, and a wonderful opportunity for me to name the colors of the balls individually as he's hitting and then replacing them.

Color Matching

Throughout the week, I set up some color matching tasks for H.  I would usually pick 2 colors at a time and set out cups or bowls along with balls or blocks of the same color and see if H could put each item in the container of the same color.  With a little practice, he was able to do this fairly consistently.

Art

I was hoping to do a lot more art experiences with H this week (like making edible finger paint in different colors), but we had a cold wave and since H usually does messy stuff without a shirt, I didn't want him to get cold.  We did end up doing some dot painting, however.  Usually I hold H's hand while pushing down the dot paints and saying 'dot, dot, dot' and pointing out the color of the dots he's making.  He really wanted to try doing it himself and made the motions correctly, but couldn't hold the dot paint at the right angle to actually make too many marks.  He absolutely loved doing this and cried when I finally took the dot paints away.  I can definitely see more art projects on the horizon for this kiddo as he gets older.

Books & DVDs

I added some books on color this week to our daily reading routine.  I'm a fan of Brown Bear, but most of the other books on color were not that interesting to read, so I let H explore them mostly on his own.

 

On those few occasions this week where I needed the video-babysitter, I put H in front of Meet the Colors from Preschool Prep (my older kids learned almost 50 sight words with a different dvd in this series) so I figure a little reinforcement won't hurt.

I had a wonderful time hanging out with my little guy this week and observing the colors of our world.