Teaching Tool Tuesday

I'm sharing one of my favorite teaching tools today. Coloring is a technique that comes over time and may be a little early to start at this age, but I love it, so I am introducing it to Audette. Although Audette is still far from Preschool, we purchased a Mead Preschool Workbook to work on together.

The book starts with colors and then progressively gets more complex with shapes, letters, numbers, etc. Audette and I are at the beginning and only do a page a week, or less depending on how busy our week is, but it is a perfect after nap or rainy day activity.

I usually do most of the coloring, but I pull out all of the green crayons for her and let her go crazy with the colors while we talk about the different things on the page, where we have seen them before, what noises they make and more. "Green is Dad's favorite color." "We eat green beans for dinner." "When we go outside today, we will collect some green leaves from the trees."

This book comes with a page of stickers, which makes for fun when matching up sticker colors and shapes with each page. You can easily use your own collection of stickers to do the same thing.

Even though Audette needs help cleaning up, she definitely is my daughter and loves putting things away. Clean up is a great time to teach too! (I am a broken record. I say that all the time. I think my mom must have scarred me as a child. Ha.) Talk about the different color crayons, let your child practice putting them in and taking them out of the box. Great motor skill exercise. Just make sure you don't let them go in and out of the mouth!