I haven’t done a Virtual Book Club for Kids post in a while, but Leo Lionni got my creative juices flowing! I came up with, what I think is a really fun project to help young children learn their colors!
I chose to read Lionni’s book A Color of His Own. It’s about a chameleon who wants to be unique like the other animals and is upset that he changes color with his environment until he meets another chameleon. The artwork in the book is simple but beautiful and it inspired me to introduce Caden to water-color paint. And this book natural lends itself to a lesson on colors and a fun color matching game.
To create this project I first made a photo copy of a page from the book and cut out the chameleon to create a pattern, which I used to trace on white construction paper with black pen.
Then we set about to paint the chameleons a rainbow of colors and I cut leaf shapes out of colored construction paper to match each chameleon. I laminated each chameleon and leaf for durability.
On the first day of painting I set up the paints as shown above and taped the chameleon to the table so it wouldn’t move around while Caden was trying to paint. Over all this set up works well, but the chameleons painted on this day were multicolored rather than a single color.
This would be fine if we were just experimenting with color, but I wanted to make matching game so I needed a chameleon for each color. The next day of painting I only gave Caden one color to paint with at a time. This worked much better for our purposes.
Next came the fun part of teaching Caden how to play the game. Caden only knows a few colors by name so I think it was a little difficult for him to understand to match the chameleon to the same colored leaf. He understands matching, but was looking for two leaves to match or two chameleons.
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