Pegs, Paint & Play

This particular little project happened during "a little bit of noise", rather than "a little bit of quiet", just to switch things up a bit! 

My son had one of his best little girlfriend's over for a play-date so we decided to pool our resources and work on a fun little activity together, which is normally always a hit with kids - keeping their hands and minds busy at the same time.

I had bought some wooden pegs from Spotlight a few weeks ago (I was there looking for supplies to make a "fascinating fascinator", which is a whole different "fascinating" post and one that I will write about soon, but I kept getting strangely distracted) and wasn't sure exactly what I was going to do with them but really just loved the old-fashioned look of them.  Anyway, they sat there for a bit looking all plain and cute and then I decided I would, or we would as it turned out, make a little learning game out of them.

I chose four different paint colours - green, yellow, pink & blue - and set the kids up painting all the pegs. While they painted, I cut up a Huggies nappy box into little rectangles and put a splodge of paint on each one and then wrote the corresponding colour in words, just with a black marker.  See where I'm going with this? A very simple colour recognition game.  The idea of the game is to slip the correct coloured peg onto the correct colour card.  Not only are they learning their colours but the little ones are working on their dexterity by having to slide the peg onto the card.  Beautiful!  As you will see this is way too easy for my 5 year old, as it should be, but I did it with my 19 month old in mind and, well, she needs a bit more practice! 

The supplies.

 

Busy little hands.

 

Beautiful co-operation.

 

In the sun to dry.

 

In action.

 

Bless her, she's trying!

  

Packed away for another day.

This was a great, easy, no-fuss activity to do with the kids and we all enjoyed ourselves - plus the sun was shining, it was warm and we were outside.  I even had a coffee with me ... talk about ticking all the important boxes!

(Oh, BTW, if you like this idea but can't be bothered with the craft aspect of it, or you just want something a little more "mature" and a whole lot more fancy-pants, then Bianca from "A Little Delightful" has made up some beautiful colour cards which are free for you to print and use. I adore her blog and her work.)