Color Match

As I mentioned yesterday, my kids had the day off school for a national holiday.

The kids were playing and I was enjoying my coffee and browsing blogs, when I came upon this great idea for a color matching activity that is super easy to set up and sure to be a hit with the kids.

While I love doing complicated, messy and time-consuming projects, for my kids I've learned to stick to the ones that are easy, clean and simple. They just don't have the attention span for me to spend more than five minutes setting up an activity that will maybe last five minutes.

So this one was great for us. I grabbed two sheets of paper, my colored pens and drew different colored dots all over the paper. I also made sure to check I was using the same colors as the stickers I had on hand, and only drew enough dots to cover all the stickers on the sheet.

This was a big hit with Lucas (3.5 years old). He got it right away and happily matched up all the blue, green and yellow stickers first. (such a boy - he totally ignored the pink stars)

Not sure exactly what expression this is, but I told him to smile! 

Now Elena (2) started off pretty well (with a pink star of course) - but as the stickers were a little hard for her to grab off the paper, and she didn't want any help, she was pretty quickly disenchanted with the whole thing.

Concentrating really hard on getting the sticker exactly on the dot.

While the kids were plugging away at their colors, I remembered another blog post about busy bags. Basically they are ziploc bags filled with different activities that can be used in all sorts of situations, when you require something quiet to keep the kids entertained. And I realized this activity would be a perfect busy bag filler. Using a smaller piece of paper (that would fit into a small ziploc) I drew all the colored dots that would match up with a smaller sticker sheet. I cut one sheet of stars into two to make two sets of the activity.

Clip the stickers onto the sheets (I used a thick cardstock paper) with a colorful title, slip into the ziplocs, into momma's purse, and we're ready for church tomorrow! (Well, at least five minutes of it.)