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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
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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!