Color Game

Littlest loves grabbing my Mother Goose Time materials that are glued to craft sticks and sticking them in her mouth.  She finds this immensely entertaining but I don't so I decided to come up with an alternative for her.  Both my girls love baby puffs so we have many empty cans around the house (they make great bowling pins or musical instruments when stuffed with objects that can rattle around when shaken).  I took the newest empty can that was conveniently sitting on my drainboard in the kitchen, cut a slit in the top (it's soft plastic so a pair of scissors worked just fine) and grabbed a handful of craft sticks I've had in my supplies since before Miss M was born.  I showed her how to drop the sticks through the slit and attempted to help her with hand-over-hand manipulation but neither of my girls has ever liked that and always prefer to do it on their own.  The slit proved to be too difficult for her so I just took the lid off and that was challenging enough.  She liked grabbing the handful of sticks and rustling them together before trying to shove the lot of them into the can.

This kept her quite entertained until Miss M returned from her swimming party and decided that the game looked like fun and took it over.  So, I grabbed another empty puffs can (like I said, we have many), a few more sticks and some markers.  I colored one end with a marker and wrote the name of the color on the stick (for silver and gold, I used star stickers and I happened to have a yellow craft stick which worked better than my marker).

We have this simple book of colors (I made a stick for each color in the book) so I sat Littlest in my lap and she turned the pages while Miss M searched for the corresponding stick.  We talked about the beginning sound and letter name, as well as the pictures in the book and other things in the room that were the same color.  We made it through the book twice before they lost interest.  I think it is a fun little game we will keep around for a while.  I am going to make up a set of color cards that Miss M can mix up, turn over and then match to a stick so we don't always have to have the book and she can do this on her while I take care of other things.  You could do it with shapes, letters and numbers--draw or write the symbol on one end and write the word along the length of the stick.