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This post has been co-written with Ben Wolfson, a full-time educator and assistant principal in the USA.
All preschoolers love their nursery rhymes, and many of them come into the classroom already knowing classics like Baa Baa Black Sheep. This famous song gives you an excellent opportunity to create a preschool rainbow theme to help students learn their color names. To keep with the sheep theme, these adorable sorting games for preschool allow you to help students sort by color as well as teaching them variations of Baa Baa Black Sheep to match each colorful page as they work.
Multiple Purpose Centers
All preschool teachers know that time is precious, and the sheer volume of skills that their students need to master before they get to “big school” means that you have to find ways to teach multiple skills at once. This is why this preschool rainbow theme activity should be in your rotation. You get at least three skills from one activity: students can learn their color names, practice fine motor control by sorting objects of different colors onto the correct boards, and practice using ten frames as introduction to one to one correspondence in math. This means you can use this activity at least three times as you focus on each separate skill, and your students will still practice the others as they repeat the activity.
Preparing Rainbow Sheep Color Sorting Mats
For this activity you will need:
Paper
Printer
Rainbow colored objects like pompoms, mini erasers, tokens, etc
Optional: laminator
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Rainbow Sheep Color Sorting Mats Activities
There are many sorting games for preschool to be had from these simple color sorting mats. Here are some to get your creative juices started:
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Filter by color – for this activity, start with a bowl of small pompoms or unifix cubes that match the colors you want to work. Have students either practice their pincer grip or use tweezers to mimic a pencil and have them find all the items of a certain color to fill up the ten frame. Have them count the items as they place them on the board, making sure that they fill the top row first from left to right as a precursor to kindergarten counting skills.
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Speed sort – using the same bowl of objects, you can have students practice their sort by color skills by having them put the objects onto the correct color boards as quickly as possible. You can ask them to say the color of the object that they’re picking up to encourage their learning of color names. As students get competent with this skill, you can discuss strategies that help them to complete this task in as quick a time as possible.
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Find and sort – finally, you can also incorporate movement into this activity by either hiding the pompoms around your room and having students find them, or have students collect any object that matches the color board. Of course, with this latter one they may find objects that don’t fit into the ten frame, but they’ll have fun sorting your classroom objects by color.
Like this? Then you’ll love my 10 Nursery Rhyme Themed Literacy and Math Centers. These easy-prep games will get your students working on math, literacy and fine motor skills.
Games included:
1) Humpty Dumpty Roll and Cover Numbers – 2 playing mats included for use with 1 or 2 dice
2) Hey Diddle Diddle Number Puzzle Strips – Work on number order for 1-10, 11-20 and counting by 2s.
3) Sequencing Mats for 9 Rhymes – The 9 rhymes included in this pack come with 1 sequencing mat each where kids will be able to put 5 different pictures in order.
4) Jack and Jill Water Pail Number Match – Practice counting and number recognition with this game.
5) Baa Baa Baa Black Sheep Color Match – Flip 2 cards over at a time trying to find the same color pair of sheep until all sheep have been matched up.
6) Little Miss Muffet Tracing Lines – 15 different patterns to trace as the spider makes its way down to Little Miss Muffet.
7) Incy Wincy Spider Alphabet Match – Pair up the upper and lowercase letters bringing together the water pipe and the sun.
8) Little Boy Blue Alphabet Haystack Hunt – Print out the haystack letter cards and hide the Little Boy Blue card behind one of them. Kids will love shouting out the letters as they try to find him ‘under the haystack’.
9) Pat-A-Cake Alphabet Decorating – Use these mats to do some Q-tip painting or pin pushing to work on fine motor skills as well as literacy.
10) 1,2,3,4,5, Fishing For Sight Words – Set up these sight words cards in a sensory bin for kids to ‘fish’ out or they could also fish out the letters to form the sight word on the card.
Check it out for more ready-to-go fun!
Nursery Rhyme Books For Your Library:
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:
Browse My Most Popular Math Printables:
1) Parking Cars Tracing Lines – More than 10 different tracing line patterns to choose from, all of which help with pencil control.
2) Scarecrow Arrange By Size – 3 different scarecrow-themed image sets that they will arrange from smallest to biggest.
3) Bumblebee Addition Game – Solve the sum and help the bee land on the correct flower!
4) Farm Shapes Mats – Use playdough, pompoms, stickers etc to learn 2D shapes.
5) Popsicle Stick Number Formation – Kids will love forming the numbers 1 to 10 when ice cream and popsicles are involved!
6) Valentines Printable Worksheets Pack – 50 pages of mixed literacy and math activities.
7) Zoo Animals Number Puzzle Strips – Complete these cute puzzles and learn the numbers 1 to 20.
8) Counting Colorful Bugs – This printable book will help kids count to 10 while also learning about color words.
9) Humpty Dumpty Numbers – In this printable game, your students will practice number recognition using 1 dice or simple addition when using 2 dice.
10) Build A Number Santa – Match the number to the correct number word, tally mark and domino to form a Santa Claus
