Primary Colors together make BROWN

First we read "Brown as an Acorn" by Molly Dingles and made our own acorn. (Hailey was going to a neighborhood preschool for a short amount of time, and I was in charge on brown one week. I had the acorn base and top already cut out.) Hailey glued the top on herself and then we put stripes on the acorn top to look more realistic.

This would also be a good activity to do with the Letter A. This book is about all the brown things you can find at a campsite. It would be easy to point out that acorns grown on trees and squirrels like acorns.

Then we did the Brown Itsy Bitsy Book.

We read "White Rabbit's Color book" by Alan Baker and made our own brown paint in a Ziploc bag.

Secondary Colors: Purple

Hailey continues to color specific sections of the whole picture as she colored her Purple Itsy Bitsy Book. She's coloring one grape in this picture.

Then we read "Purple as a Plum" by Molly Dingles to identify purple items and "White Rabbit's Color Book" by Alan Baker to learn how to make purple. We then made purple paint ourselves but it looks more brown to me.
To finish off, Hailey made a collage with purple paint and purple foam shapes.

Secondary Colors: Green

Hailey colored the Itsy Bitsy Book Green. An interesting thing that Hailey started doing today was coloring a specific portion of what she wanted to color. In this picture she is coloring the very tip on the dragon's tail. Also, she colored the eye on the snake and that was all. She tried as hard as a 2 year-old could to color within the lines. It's fun to see her develop.

We read "Green as a Frog" by Molly Dingles so we could point out all the things that are green. However, Hailey insisted to called it red instead of green.
Finally we read "White Rabbit's Color Book" by Alan Baker to learn how to make green. We mixed yellow and blue paint so Hailey could add paint to her collage along with feathers, foam shapes, and green glitter glue.

Secondary Colors: Orange

We first colored the Itsy Bitsy Book orange.Then I read her the "White Rabbit's Color Book" by Alan Baker. We only read about mixing yellow and red together to get orange.

Then we tried to make orange ourselves.

Hailey finished up by making a collage with feathers, foam shapes, felt and paint.

Primary Colors: Blue

I couldn't get the "blue as a..." book from the library so we read "Turquoise As a Parakeet" by Molly Dingles since it's close enough to blue.
Then Hailey colored her Itsy Bitsy Blue Book with markers.

For our collage today we used, blue paint, foam shapes. feathers, felt, and glitter glue.

She really had a hay day with the materials and kept piling it on. She also wanted to cover the feathers with a "blanket" (the blue felt stripes) so they could go night-night.

Primary Colors: Yellow

Today we had a friend over who joined us for Hailey School. For Yellow we read "Yellow as a Lemon" by Molly Dingles. It has about 12 items that are yellow, then on the last page puts it all together so you can find the yellow items. Then we color our Itsy Bitsy Yellow book with markers.

After that we did a color collage with paint, foam shapes, felt, and feathers.

Primary Colors: Red

Now we are going to focus on individual colors for the next three weeks. To keep track of the colors we are doing, we have an ice cone to build.

We first read "White Rabbit's Color Book" by Alan Baker. I love this book and will use this a lot. It is about this white rabbit that finds 3 tubs of paint and decides to take a dip and mix colors.We made a red collage starting this red paint...

then we added feathers, red foam shapes, and red felt.
Here is the one I did.

We also read "Hello, Red Fox" by Eric Carle which is a great book for teaching complementary colors but is too advantage for Hailey. I didn't want to confuse her so we just simple read it instead of point out the different colors on it. Hailey loves foxes and animals.

Color Review with a Video

Since it was the last day of the week for Hailey School we did any easy lesson. First we read "Curious Kitties: A Colors Book" Illustrated by Melanie Marshell. This book has adds a different colored yarn each page and that turns into a quilt. Hailey likes this book a lot.
Then we watched SoSmart : Colors video for babies 12-36 months. We watched this about a year ago and Hailey didn't like it but now she wanted to watch it over and over. It goes over 7 colors individually with a simple, animated story.

While we watched the video we sorted foam shapes into the color piles. Then we pointed to the color the video is talking about.

Color Review: Rainbow with Fredda Frog

Hailey loves playing with the computer. I found this lesson plan online and we had a good time with it.
We listen to Fredda the Frog go over the colors of the rainbow three times.

Then we colored the cards of the different colored objects. I had Hailey pick out which marker matched with the object. She did real well with yellow and blue.

Hailey wanted me to color some instead of herself. Then to finish it off we watched the video again.

Color Review: Bears in Bed

We went through "Let's Play: Colors" by DK and looked at all the colors in there. On the back page, it talks about what children can do at different ages. At 24 months, "Your child will name the brightest and most frequently seen colors first. ... She'll begin to be able to group things by their color." Then at 30 months "Your child may be able to name two or three colors, usually the brightest ones, but he'll also recognize more subtle colors such as pink and purple. He'll also begin to see difference between colors where the contrasts are most striking." Finally, "From 3 years upward, she might name four to five colors. Her eye will also begin to notice subtleties of coloring. She'll distinguish pink from red, lavender from purple, brown and gray from black, orange from red and turquoise from green and blue."

I found this information interesting and it helps me to know what Hailey should and shouldn't be able to do. *Side Note: Interesting enough is that Nathan is the only one out of his 3 brothers who is not color blind.

I made Ten in a Bed activity out of felt. I only have 8 colors since I couldn't find black, gray, or purple at Walmart. Hailey had fun with the songs and pulling the bears off.

Finally, we ended with "Seven Blind Mice" by Ed Young. It's about these mice who take turns figuring out what the "something" is at the pond. I love the moral at the end. "Knowing in part may make a fine tale, but wisdom comes from seeing the whole."

Here's is everything we used. It was a good lesson today.

Color Review: A Garden of Colors

Approaching the concept of colors is a little different from letters. With letters I focused more on objects that start with the letter and less on the shape of the letter. However with colors, I'm focusing on many items that has a certain color. This might make my lessons seem a little more random but I'm still new and experimenting with it. Hailey knows the names of colors and most of the time can answer correctly when asked what color is a specific color. Sometimes, I think she just pulls a color out of her head instead of really looking at what I'm asking and answering correctly.

It's fun to see her learn and grow. At first, everything was blue and just last week, she's really been picking up on the color brown. Red and pink are hard for her (she likes pink better).

So, to start our color unit we looked at a variety of colors. First we read "Elmo's First Book of Colors" by Sesame Street. Hailey did a good job pointing out different objects of a certain color.

After that we read "My Colors, My World" by Maya Christina Gonzalez. I liked the illustrations and it had short sentences. It shows how colors are all around us. Also it repeats everything in Spanish. Nathan read this book to Hailey for her night-time story in both English and Spanish. Then, we colored flowers in our mini-garden book. She went through this quickly even though there were 8 pages to color. I think she doesn't like being restricted to certain colors.

Alphabet Review

I'm really glad I started Hailey School. We are done with the Alphabet Unit. Here is a video of Hailey saying her ABC's. (Sorry I can't turn the video.)

Before we started Hailey would only repeat a handful of letters and a lot pf them sounded like "e". Now she can clearly repeat her letters after me and even say a-g by herself. I know she looks forward to Hailey School and that time alone with mommy.

Next week we will start our Colors Unit.

Chicka Chicka Boom Boom

I found this activity on notimeforflashcards and thought it would be a fun way to review and wind up our alphabet section. So, we started by reading the book "Chicka Chicka Boom Boom" by Bill Martin.
I rolled, taped, and cut the newspaper for Hailey.
I had letter stickers for us to decorate. Hailey loves stickers.
While we did this we sang the alphabet song and talked about which letters we were putting on.

Z is for Zebra

To finish off the alphabet we did Zebra for Z.
We colored our Itsy Bitsy Book to be familiar with other words that start with Z.
Then we made a Paper Bag Zebra. Hailey wasn't in the coloring mood today.
She had fun playing with the bag and pasting the pieces on.
We read "Zeely Zebra" by Barbara Derubertis together. It's goes through a story on how this zebra, who has a dream to be on the racing team, makes it with hard work.

Y is for Yellow Yarn and Yogurt

The Letter Y has a lot of mini activities instead of a big one with only one theme.

First, we started with the Itsy Bitsy Y Book.
Then I had Hailey cut the yarn into pieces to put on our Y. (I crocheted a yellow blanket so I had extra yarn.)
Hailey first put the glue on the Y then covered it with yarn. She was excited when she made an X with the yarn all by herself. (I didn't help or suggest this she just pulled the yarn straight and then crossed the other piece with the first one. She's very smart!!!)
Here's our finished product. (Hailey's on the left and mine is on the right.)
Next we did yogurt painting.

I had Hailey squeeze the food coloring on the different piles and stir with her fingers.

Hailey doesn't like being messy so she enjoyed watching (and telling) me what to do. We "drew" a flower, the letter H for Hailey, and the letter Y in the yogurt. She also ate some especially the blue colored one. (We used vanilla yogurt.)

I couldn't think of any books to go along with this. I didn't want a yellow book since we'll be doing colors soon.

X Marks the Spot

This lesson took a lot of preparation to do but was fun.
We first colored a xylophone and a x-ray on one paper.

Then we colored the treasure map that had a big X on it. Then we read "Treasure Map" by Stuart J. Murphy. I hide the first clue on the last page of the book. The clue had a picture of the car.
Hailey was excited about the green paper which had a picture of the phone.
She found her phone quickly and carried the phone with her for a while. The next clue had a picture of the table.

The table led us to the stairs.
The stairs led us to the computer.

The other papers by the computer were a little distracting but she found the green paper with a little help. The paper then led us to the bath tub.
Inside the bath tub was a pumpkin with a big X on it. Hailey got really excited about the X. Here's our "map" and clues with the treasure.
Then we had a lot of fun painting the pumpkins.

Yeah, All-Done!!! This was a great lesson and very interactive.