For week 2 of our color unit, we focused on the color orange! It is amazing when your mind is focused on a particular thing, how much you begin to notice. Orange has never been a favorite color of mine, but after spending a week all about orange, I must say I have a greater appreciation for the way it points us to things.
Hudson and I noticed how much orange was everywhere along the street and within construction sites. Traffic cones, street barricades, the letters on trucks. Orange is everywhere. It is not the type of color that gets all the glory, like blue or green, but our world simply would not function as well without this bright color pointing us into the right direction. So thank you, orange!
With this new appreciation for all things orange, Hudson and I had a lot of fun exploring and learning about this color through books, play, and hands-on activities.
Week 2: The Color Orange
This is what our week of orange looked like:
Orange Books of the Week
- Who Eats Orange? by Dianne White
This book was the perfect book to read again and again this week. It is a great book to teach all the different colors through types of food and the animals that eat each color. The illustrations are beautiful and bright.
- Orange Blob by CJ Smith
We do not have a copy of this book, so we watched it on Youtube. It is a really cute story about a blob that only does orange things. The word “orange” is repeated a lot throughout the story, so it is great for little learners. Also, orange blob only plays with orange soccer balls, which made Hudson excited, since he too loves playing soccer.
- It’s Pumpkin Time! By Zoe Hall
Even though this book is centered around planting pumpkin seeds for Halloween, it is still a fun one to read in the spring as it explains the process of growing a pumpkin. I love the bright illustrations of this book and the way it shows the changing colors of the pumpkins as they grow.
- Peek-A-Flap Dig! By Jaye Garnett
After noticing how much orange is within construction sites, we pulled this book off our shelf. This is definitely a favorite of Hudson’s. He loves the flaps and loves naming the different trucks and equipment. He gets very excited at the crane and bulldozer page. A fun orange activity with this book is to point out all the orange cones.
Monday: Orange Sensory Bin + Orange Scavenger Walk
For this week’s bin, we collected as many orange things we could find. I definitely noticed we had less orange items than red items from last week, but we had enough to make a relatively full bin.
Our orange bin consisted of: Lego Duplo clown fish, big orange lego blocks, plush basketball, orange drumsticks, orange train tracks, foam pumpkin cutouts, lion and tiger finger puppets, orange letters, orange popsicle sticks, orange pom poms, and a few other random orange things.
Similar to last week, we made towers with the orange blocks in the bin and we made an orange line after reading The Lineup Book.
On our orange scavenger walk, we got the chance to really notice the beautiful orange flowers in our neighbor’s frontyard and the orange leaves on the ground. This orange scavenger hunt continued throughout our week, as we noticed how the Ex on the FedEx truck is orange and even sometimes green. We noticed the amount of orange traffic cones and signs and barricades out right now due to the quarantine. Even the rocks along the shore were all orange!
This color scavenger walk is a great activity to carry throughout your week. You might just be surprised at how much one particular color is in fact all around you!
Tuesday: Squeeze Orange Juice + Bouncing Basketball Craft
Grammy came over this Tuesday morning and Hudson and her together squeezed some fresh orange juice. Hudson loves making juice with his grammy and especially loves drinking it after!
Like the baseball craft from last week, I wanted to come up with an orange craft that was aligned with Hudson’s interests. Naturally, I landed on basketballs. For this simple craft, I took a paper cup and covered the opening with foil. We used this as a cicle stamp to create the basketball shape. I actually really like the way the foil stamp turned out! It created circles that have a more textured look on paper. A sponge cut into a circle would also work well for this craft.
On the cardstock, I created dotted “bounces” as a guide to encourage him to stamp the basketball at the bottom and top of the peaks. This allows the basketballs to look as if they are bouncing across the page.
Hudson loved the outcome and enjoyed watching me draw the lines on the basketball, but was not as into the process of stamping. I have a feeling he will enjoy a craft like this even more in a year.
The part Hudson enjoyed the most was actually the process of creating the orange paint. I only had white paint, so we created our own by adding red and yellow dye to the paint. This is a fun way to show how colors are created. H really enjoyed adding the yellow dye and mixing it with his paintbrush.
Wednesday: Orange Picnic + Carrot Dig
There are SO many yummy orange foods, so it was easy to create a full picnic with all of our orange favorites. In our picnic, we had orange slices, cheddar rocket crackers from Trader Joe’s, dried mango, carrots, and a carrot-apple squeeze pack also from Trader Joe’s.
A color picnic is a fun and tasty way to teach colors! Thinking of the color orange even helped guide me as I made my weekly grocery trip. I found myself trying new flavors and foods because they were orange and I was curious.
The carrot dig sensory bin setup was SO simple and was by far Hudson’s favorite activity that we did all week. All I did was pour soil into an aluminum food tray and buried about 12 carrots. Hudson is very into all things gardening, so this was the perfect activity for him. He loved shoveling the dirt and it was nice to have a more controlled area where playing with dirt and digging were acceptable. After he found all the carrots, I let him wash them with a bowl of water. The washing them part was equally as fun for him.
This activity is a great thing to leave out for a few hours and let your little ones go and play with it as they wish.
Thursday: Paint the Ex Orange + Pumpkin-Vine Weaving
I came up with this idea as I noticed on our Monday run how bright and orange the Ex is on the FedEx truck. Hudson is very much into all types of trucks so this was another way for me to tie in his interests. I did not have much expectations for this craft, but it turned out to be a fun one. Hudson definitely needed help to actually paint the white space on the Ex, but he did enjoy wildly waving his orange brush all over.
Even though it is not fall, we did play a bit with pumpkins. With some of the foam pumpkin cutouts I had, I showed him how to hole punch and helped him to weave the vine (green pipe cleaner) into the top of the pumpkin. This is a great activity for those fine motor skills. This activity would work great paired with that pumpkin book I mentioned above.
Friday: Orange Collage Activity + Orange Water Mixing/Sponge Activity
We used similar materials from last week’s collage: white card stock paper, feathers, pom poms, popsicle sticks, foam shapes, orange origami paper, and pipe cleaners.
This week, I left the materials out longer, so he could come to the art table when he actually felt like it. I realized morning time is a better time for him to do an activity like this. He was much more into pointing to where he wanted each item to go on the paper. I helped him glue, but he showed me the design he had in mind. It was a good team effort.
For the water activity, I simply created two containers of water: one dyed red and one dyed yellow. I let him scoop with a cup each color into a new bowl to make orange. I also put some sponges out for him to play with. With the orange water, we worked on sponge transferring water to the empty containers. So simple and a great way to show how the color orange is made.
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