Yellow Wrap-up

We have enjoyed our first Color Week. In case you missed a post, here's how it started. We played with colored rice, in the pool, with lemon cloud dough, and with stickers (see our sensory activities here). We read several books. We ate bananas, wore yellow clothes, and looked for yellow cars.

Also this week, we watched a few yellow-themed videos on YouTube.  I like to put them on while I fix her hair because she stands relatively still and will look in the direction of the screen if I need her to face this way or that way. We watched "Color Y-E-L-L-O-W yellow song", recommended by Play-Create-Explore.  It wasn't long before we were singing along.

Being big Sesame Street and Muppet fans, we watched "Yellow Submarine," which she thought was fun.

Finally, her favorite yellow video was "Color Songs for Kids - Yellow Color"  (I get a little bugged by the fact that the puppet starts out with a character voice but doesn't sing with one, but that's just me.  Other than that, it's fine.)  It has a great beat and my toddler loves to dance to it.

Do you have any other YELLOW videos that we should check out? Can you think of any other amazing ways to celebrate YELLOW?

Yellow Books

As part of our Yellow Week, we read several books with the color yellow as a focus or with yellow ducks, as that was one of the popular things in her yellow basket.  As I kind of decided to do a Color of the Week program on Sunday and start it on Monday, I didn't have as much time to request books from the library, so I also started requesting Green books at the same time.  I'm a week or so ahead in terms of requests and am compiling a list of color related books so that I can request them as we approach that color.

Yellow Ball, by Molly Bang

Toddler liked this one.  It has only one word or short phrase per page, so it's super fast, but she liked pointing out the yellow ball in each scene and talking about what happened to the ball.  This was probably her favorite of the set.

The Girl on the Yellow Giraffe, by Ronald Himler

This was a cute idea - it follows the journey of a little girl who rides on a yellow giraffe scooting toy but instead of the everyday world we see, she interprets things as a magical.  2.5 year old wasn't very impressed though.  Maybe for a 3yo?

Guess Who, Baby Duck, by Amy Hest

Toddler liked identifying the baby duck in each of the pictures and discussing what she was doing.  Not much plot, but it was ok.

Quick Duck, by Mary Murphy

Another quick story.  This is a good one for prepositions, which is something my 2.5 yo is working on acquiring.

Dimity Duck, by Jane Yolen

Toddler and I both enjoyed the illustrations in this book.  I read the book to her and then she read it to me.  (Her version mostly consisted of "Little duck in the water." Turn page.  "Little duck in the water."  Turn page.)  Much more wordy than the others, but a very cute story.

We also requested "Little Yellow Pear Tomatoes," "10 Little Rubber Ducks," "One Little Duck," and "Henry and Pawl and the Round Yellow Ball" from our library circuit, but they didn't arrive before our yellow week was over.

Did we miss any good ones? Share your YELLOW book suggestions with us!

Yellow Sensory Activities

We had a lot of fun during our Yellow Week!  Here are some of the things we did:

1. Colored rice in the sensory bin

The night before our Yellow Week began, I dyed some rice (I use Learn-Play-Imagine's method and let it sit overnight).  She enjoyed scooping with with a shovel from her sand toys and a cup and teapot from her play dishes.  I also would hide small things (giant paperclips, big buttons, plastic bugs, etc.) under the rice for her to find.  Later in the week, she used her Duplos in the rice bin.

2.  Yellow things in the kiddie pool

We pulled out our little kiddie pool this week. It's just the right size for one little kid.  We put it in the shade and she just splashed in her clothes so that I didn't have to put sunscreen on her.  She played with her ducks and her balls and her scoop from her sand toys in the water.  (We also blew bubbles because that's one of her all time favorites.  Those didn't have anything to do with the color yellow, though.)

3. Yellow cloud dough

We used the Lemon Cloud Dough recipe on Paging Fun Mums.  I made the mistake of using "baby" scented lotion -- it was sitting unused in my cupboard and I figured, "why not?"  I'll tell you why not: the scent was almost overpowering and no amount of lemon juice could make it lemon scented instead of fake-o baby scented.  Toddler didn't care, though. She made sure Dolly got to play, too.  We played with this with all our cookie cutters, not just the yellow ones.  She asked for me to form various shapes and letters.

4.  Stickers

We also stuck yellow stickers to yellow paper.  I took some time this week while Jo was playing at the park with her daddy to prepare stickers for the other colors.  I have TONS of stickers (thank you, dollar stores...) and I peeled off the background sticker part and cut them into individual stickers and pre-sorted them by colors.  It would be a better use of her color identifying skills to have her find the yellow stickers herself, but she would also be more likely to wander off with a full sticker sheet and stick all colors of smiley faces to my piano bench.  (I know this because we tried that approach.)  Instead, I put the colored sheet of paper and the individual yellow stickers on a cookie sheet and she sat and peeled and stuck.

What else would/did you do with the color YELLOW?

Color of the Week 1: Yellow

Week one of our colorful summer has just finished and our first color is YELLOW!

After breakfast and our usual morning routine (which included a yellow cup and plate at breakfast and a yellow shirt), we put a blanket (yellow) on the floor and sat down together. We sang a couple of songs and did a couple of finger plays (her current favorite is "Open, Shut Them"). Then I told her that I had something fun planned for us and pulled out my picnic basket. The night before, I went through her toys and other things in the house and pulled out everything yellow and put them in the basket. She was very excited to see what was inside! When she opened it, she first encountered this piece of paper:

(Little girl holding a yellow piece of paper with the sentence "Our color of the week is Yellow" written on it.)

She wasn't too interested in the paper, but I read the words to her and then we placed it out of the way. She loved seeing some of her familiar toys in the basket. As she pulled items out, we would talk about what they are and that they are yellow.

Picnic Basket full of things that are the color yellow

Here's what was in our yellow basket:

• Little Pig #1 and his house
• a little teapot and a plate, cup, saucer, fork, knife, and spoon from her play dishes
• cookie cutters
• a scoop from her sand toys
• Duplo blocks
• ducks and other bath toys
• bananas from her play food
• balls of various sizes and compositions
• shape sorter pieces
• letters from her LeapFrog Fridge Phonics
• plastic bugs
• big buttons
• giant paper clips
• a hair clip
• a chip clip
• a crayon
• a lion
• a giraffe
• an Easter chick
• a fuzzy bee
• a star bracelet
• a star shaped balloon weight

Overall, there were 75 items in the basket (counting each Duplo as one, etc.)

She built a tower with the Duplos and had a great time cramming the ducks into the teapot (and having me get them out so she could do it again and again).  Over the course of the week, we pulled things out of this basket to use in our various activities (look for another post!) and she returned to the basket to look through it several times.  By the end of the week, she was asking to play with her "yellow things!"

Stay tuned for more about our Yellow Week!  What would you put in your yellow basket?