Valentine’s Day offers many opportunities to discuss colors and color words with your students. Try the following activities to explore colors with your children at home or at school!
Candy Heart Color Sorting Mats – candy heart color sorting
Materials needed: Candy conversation hearts, candy heart color sorting.pdf (linked above). Give each child a candy heart color sorting work mat and have children sort the hearts onto the appropriate colored heart.
Extensions for young children: There is a heart color sorting mat that has all of the hearts colored in so it is more visually obvious where each candy heart goes. There is also a harder work mat that has just the outline of the heart colored.
For older children: The third sorting work mat has the color word inside the heart, instead of being colored in.
Candy Heart Color Mixing
Materials needed: One package of candy hearts for each small group, containers for color mixing, spoons, food coloring (the children can use Koolaid, if desired) and water, snow, or ice shavings (depending on the climate where you live and materials available.)
Open the package of candy hearts for the children and discuss the colors of the hearts. Ask the children if they know what primary colors, mixed together, form different colors. Tell the children that you are going to experiment mixing two colors together to form the colors of the candy hearts. Let each small group pick which color of heart they would like to try and make by mixing colors together. *Be sure to check for any potential food dye allergies when using food coloring at home or in the classroom.
Additional Color Experiment to Try:
Put a white carnation in a cup of water with red food coloring over a few days the carnation will begin to turn red, and continue turning as long as it is in the water. Alternate activity ideas: Put several carnations in water and use more or less drops of food coloring. Does that affect the color of the carnation in the end?
There are many extension activities for candy hearts and teaching colors included in the Valentine’s and Friendship Thematic Unit at The Preschool Toolbox Blog!