Artfully Montessori: Four Color Activities and a Free Montessori Color Tablets Extension, too!

YOUR MONTESSORI CHILDREN WILL LOVE WORKING WITH COLOR USING COLOR TABLETS, COLOR-MIXING, AND EVEN THE MOVEABLE ALPHABET.
Here are four fun extensions with the Montessori Color Tablets that include these curriculum areas: Music/Sensorial, Math, Art and Language. And, please don't miss my newest freebie: "Montessori Color Tablet Activity!"

MY NEWEST FREEBIE

I got this idea from a long-time colleague, Mary Cooper, and I decided to create a freebie for all of you to enjoy in your Montessori environments.

You'll find the link at the end of this post. Or, if you are already a subscriber, then you can download this resource right away!

It is a hands-on matching work that moves into a take-home activity sheet, that even goes further to become a fun rhyming words/Language activity as well!

What I love most about Montessori materials is that you can use them in so many ways as the children become more and more skilled at using them.

The Montessori Color Tablets have always been one of my favorites, especially Color Box 3 with its amazing array of color hues that can turn into a beautiful work of art when completed!

MUSIC & SENSORIAL

Children in just about every Montessori environment, set up the Color Box 3 in a lovely display that also sharpens their visual discrimination skills.

Your children may already do this lovely extension with Color Box 3, in which you arrange the various shades of tablets from darkest to lightest from a center nonagon or circle. When the child has completed the work, then we set a candle in the middle (battery operated candles work great) and then we sing the song, "I Can Sing a Rainbow."

Here are the words to that song:

"Red and orange and yellow and green

Blue and violet, too.

I can sing a rainbow, Sing a rainbow

You can sing a rainbow, too."

Adding the song, creates a little celebration for color!

MATH

This "Color Addition" activity combines color mixing with math symbols.

I learned about this activity during my AMS training years ago and it is a wonderful reinforcement for your classroom work with color mixing and understanding the secondary colors from the elements of art.

There are strips of paper from a template with 5 squares printed on each strip. The first square is blank, second square has a printed plus sign, then there is another blank, followed by a printed equal sign and finally the fifth square is a blank.

The child colors in the blank squares with first a primary color (ex: red) then fills the third square with another primary color (ex: yellow) and then colors the final blank square with the resulting secondary color that results when the 2 primary colors are mixed. (ex: red+yellow=orange)

ART

The Color Tablets in the very first Montessori "Casa di Bambini" in Rome, were made of spools of thread. This beautiful work pictured below is a simple round tray that is set up for the children to arrange actual spools of thread around to create a Color Wheel, to go along with your studies of the Elements of Art.

This activity works best if you can find a round tray with compartments so that the child can see the place to lay out each spool. Also, I would recommend creating a control card of a color wheel that would go along with this activity.

You can add another challenge of placing small labels of the names of each color that has been arranged on the child's color wheel.

LANGUAGE

This Activity is a combination of the Montessori Color Tablets and the Montessori Moveable Alphabet!

You can add objects (such as a button that is the color of the tablet).

This particular work was designed to work with the phonogram alphabet box and so the double ee is built with the red letters and then circled with a small embroidery hoop.

MORE LANGUAGE IN MY "FREEBIE"

This Activity is designed to be set up first as a manipulative shelf work, with a laminated control chart. The child finds the correct color tablet from Box 2 and then places it on the correct drawing of the particular color tablet pictured. (ex: the red color tablet) Then, the child reads the word "red" and points to the picture of the bed and says, "bed." That rhymes!

After the child has done the work with the actual tablets, the s/he is ready to make her own chart. In my Freebie, there are templates for you to copy for the children to fill in the colors and the name of the color and they can even color in the object pictured. (ex: red bed)

Later, the child can make another chart and fill in the name of the rhyming word instead of the name of the color.

This was always a popular activity with my groups when I was a classroom teacher! I hope your group enjoys it, too.

If you are already a subscriber, then you can go to my Subscribers Freebie Collection and enter the password to access my 40+ free resources.

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