Play Create Explore: Color of the Week: Brown

Welcome back to the

here on Play Create Explore!

This week we explored the color Brown! I had so much I wanted to do for brown, but I just didn't get to everything due to a hectic week. Please also excuse the lack of "in action" pictures, as it has seemed that time has slipped away from me this week.

Brown Objects Exploration Bin

As always, the first thing we do on the first day of our color themed weeks, is walk around the house and gather a bunch of our toys and other objects for the color of the week. This serves as a bit of an introduction to the color of the week and we also explore this bowl all throughout the week. I keep it right on the dining room table and we often go through this bowl and talk about the things in it during breakfast, lunch or dinner. For my 20 month old, it serves as a great way to identify and verbalize new objects, experience different shapes and textures, as well as different shades of our color. For my oldest, it's a great tool for encouraging language and communication.

Simple Brown Sensory Bins

(from top to bottom)

Chocolate Scented Rice (see how to make HERE)

Coffee Beans

Coffee Grounds

A mixture of them all plus dry beans

Brown Animal Corral

We have lots of plastic animals so I just gathered the ones with brown and put them inside our fence. This gave both boys the opportunity for pretend play, but also a great way to identify the names of animals and their characteristics.

Hot Chocolate Bath

We didn't get around to a brown themed bath this week, BUT this is our hot chocolate themed bath that we did this past December. The brown water is created with hot chocolate packets and smelled amazing. It would be such a fun brown themed bath! See the details of our bath HERE on Bath Activities for Kids.

I bought these cookie coasters in the dollar bin at Target

and we used them for pretend play, counting, and matching.

Chocolate Play Dough

I made some Chocolate Play Dough using Nurture's Store's Chocolate Play Dough Recipe, but also adding a bit of chocolate extract as well. Man did this smell amazing! This wasn't our first time making chocolate play dough, but it STILL blew me away how delicious it smelled.

What else did we do?

Here are a few other very simple ways we focused on "brown" this week

--We identified brown ALL over the place. If something was brown, frequently I identified it and said it outloud. "The table is brown." "The dirt is brown." "What color is our couch? Our couch is brown!" You can never have too much repetition! However, we didn't leave out or ignore other colors though. In our everyday play I still identified other colors, I just put a lot of focus on brown specifically!

We talked a lot about animals with brown fur and feathers.

We read the books "Brown Bear Brown Bear" and "Little Nut Brown Hare."

-We listened to THIS brown color themed kindergarten song on Youtube.

We checked out different brown foods

As a treat, the boys ate chocolate chip cookies and drank chocolate milk!

We went outside on a nature walk to discover and talk about all the brown things we saw.

You could also

Make Treasure Rocks