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.

D is for Dragon

This was a very short lesson but I learned a lot about being a teacher. To start out, we read the letter D book from the Alphabook series and we put the D caterpillar circle up.

The Dragon books we read were: "I Miss You, Stinky Face" by Lisa McCourt and "I Spy a Scary Monster" I wanted to read "The Paper Bag Princess" but the library didn't have it. Then I cut out the letter D out of blue construction paper so Hailey can turn it into a Dragon.

Since there was nothing to color, I thought that Hailey should be in charge of gluing the pieces on. I also cut out triangles for the Dragon's spikes. Since Hailey wasn't squeezing hard enough I helped her by putting a straight line of glue for the spikes.

After the spikes were on I tried to have her put the eye where I thought it should go. Also I put the red fire where I thought it should go too. However, Hailey wanted to put glue everywhere and wanted more eyes.

I quickly realized how I wanted this cute little 2 year old to make "perfect" crafts. That is not how I wanted to teach her and it's her craft to turn out however she wants it to be. So, I let go of control and just limited her materials. (She would've put on all the eyes we had if I let her.)

This is Hailey's finished dragon and her sad face that I took the glue away. (She was getting it on her arms) If you want to see how the dragon is supposed to look like go to: http://www.notimeforflashcards.com/search/label/Dragons