Homeschool Colours Project

A fellow mama in our housing co-op and I have endeavored to teach simple lessons once a week to our 3 year olds on Tuesday mornings alternating homes and lesson planning.  My first lesson was about colours.  We talked about the primary and secondary colours.  The most popular project of the day was dropping food colouring into clear cups of water to watch how the colours mixed.  So we started with yellow, blue and red and then created purple, orange and green.

This was a great activity that a fellow mama told me about.  And water, cups and food colouring are usually on hand.  Next we filled in colour wheels to give us an idea about what the wheels look like and how the colours connect to each other.

We then read:

Planting a Rainbow by Lois Ehlert

Rainbow Fun! by Beth Harwood

and Van Gogh's World of Colour by Julie Aigner-Clark

These books are very simple but kept the theme accessible.  We see these learning days as fun first and more of an introduction than teaching as you would with older children.

Our final activity was a game that I made up.  I placed coloured fabric in a circle around the room and we laid out the names of the colours in English, French and Spanish around their appropriate fabric.  With the help of this Cd (which I loved by the way) we said the words together.  Then each child took a bag with coloured objects and placed them on the mats as we called out the different names.

This game was easy to do with toys and objects I had on hand.  The Cd I borrowed from the library and the books we had on hand.  Such a fun start to our home pre-school.

On a side note Kyan really picked up more than I thought when he said in the car the other day: "It's Amarillo, right Mama?"  and we then had fun going over all the names together.  Little minds really are like sponges.