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This post has been co-written with Ben Wolfson, a full-time educator and assistant principal in the USA.
Helping young students learn their colors is so much fun – there’s so many ways to help them learn the right names and identify objects with those colors. However, you can tap into the sudden popularity of unicorn theme lesson resources with this cute color matching activity with friendly unicorns helping your students to learn their colors. It’s an easy activity that will quickly become a firm independent center activity and one that can be repeated over and over again.
Why Learning Colors Is Important
In a world where the majority of your school day is driven by early literacy and math work, it can feel like there is little time for creative expression through art. However, learning colors is an essential skill for students to master so that they can choose the right colors to illustrate their work or create diagrams in your preschool science lessons. Color matching activities for preschool is a good problem-solving skill that helps students to broaden their abstract thinking as well as helping them focus on a specific task for a longer duration of time.
Preparing Your Counting On to 20 Math Clip Cards
For this activity you will need:
Paper
Printer
Tokens to cover the unicorns
Plastic spinner or paperclip and pencil combination
Optional: laminator
If you don’t have the materials needed, don’t sweat! You can get it delivered to your doorstep really quickly with Amazon Prime. You can get a 30-day free trial here.
Ways To Extend the Unicorn Theme Color Matching Mat
This unicorn theme color matching mat is easy to use straight off the printer. Simply find a small box of colored tokens and make a spinner with a pencil and paperclip. Each student takes it in turn to spin and place a token on the matching colored unicorn, and the students take turns until all the unicorns are covered. To extend this color-matching center, try some of these color matching activities for preschool:
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Hide the spinner – you can turn learning colors into a collaborative speaking and listening game by printing a board for each player in the group. Each player takes it in turn to be the spinner and turns their back to the group as they spin a color. They then announce the color out loud and all other players cover up a matching unicorn of that color.
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Replace the colors with words – to encourage reading and correct spelling of the color words, simply replace the colors on the spinner with the words instead. If you feel that you need a bridge between the colors and the words, consider typing the words on top of the colored circles or writing the words in the correct color to help.
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Add numbers – a final way to extend this color-matching task is to write random numbers from 1 to 6 on each unicorn, and have students roll a dice after they spin a color. They then have to find a unicorn that matches both the color and the number. You may need to print two sets to make sure you have all 36 possible combinations!
More Preschool Math and Literacy Activities:
Need more help with your lesson planning? This bundle of literacy and math centers for preschool and kindergarten currently includes 16 different themed packs – each pack comes with 5 literacy and 5 math centers. You’ll save a ton of time and so much money!
Delightful Unicorn Theme Books:
Other Printables That Work On Learning Colors:
1) Fruit and Vegetable Color Clip Cards – Preschoolers will love learning colors with these fruit and vegetable fine motor clipcards. This color matching game can be used any time of the year that you are working on healthy eating habits and nutrition with your kids.
2) Rainbow Chameleon Color Sorting – These Rainbow Chameleon Color Sorting Mats combine color word recognition, early math skills, fine motor development and science all in one. April showers bring May flowers and lots of lovely rainbows so get those colorful pompoms out for some sorting fun!
3) Colorful Pumpkin Sorting – Pumpkin-themed mats for sorting out pom poms into different colors.
Educational Tools For Your Classroom:
Other Animal Printables You’ll Love:
1) Zoo Animal Sight Words Bingo – Use this as a small group literacy center in your classroom to learn pre-primer Dolch sight words.
2) Zoo Animal Number Puzzle Strips – Learn to sequence numbers with these cute puzzles.
3) Farm Animal Find and Cover Letters – Work on letter recognition any time of the year.
4) Count the Chickens – practice counting from 1 to 10 with these clip cards.
5) Bird Theme 3-Part Cards – learn different types of birds in this Montessori-style activity.
6) Rainbow Chameleon Color Sorting – laminate these mats and use them to sort color pompoms.
7) Mr. Alligator’s Shape Bubble Hunt – Spin the wheel then color in a matching shape.
8) Unicorn Ten Frame Mats – make math a little more magical while teaching one-to-one correspondence, counting, and the use of ten frames.
9) Dog Bone Math Game – Count up the bones and solve the simple sums within 10.
10) Animal Alphabet Follow the Letter – 26 pages to learn uppercase letter recognition.
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