Color Themed Baths

During our Color of the Week Series here on Play Create Explore, we explored 11 colors, 1 color-1 week at a time. We did tons of activities and sensory bins each week, but my favorite part of our color explorations were our color themed baths! They were fun to set up, and the kids of course had a blast! The best part is that for my youngest especially (21 mo) it was a really fun way to reinforce color recognition. Out of our 11 weeks of color, I did 8 color themed baths including red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink, and black. 

for each bath, you can click the bath title's link to see our full color themed week and more details about each bath! 

Red Apple Bath

A red apple themed bath with a fun letters and numbers learning activity. 

Orange Color Mixing Bath

Squeeze bottles filled with red and yellow to ultimately create an orange bath. 

Fun while learning about color theory. 

Yellow Sunshine Bath

A sunny yellow lemon scented bath with a learning shapes focus. 

Sunshine Bath Paint included! 

Green Forest Bath

A simple bath with green objects and a painted green forest. Very fitting since we live in the woods :) 

Green Eucalyptus Bath Paint included! 

Berry Blue Bath

This yummy berry scented bath had a ton of fun artsy elements, including 

Sparkling Berry Blue Bath Paint and Berry Blue "spray painting" 

Purple Grape Bath

A super simple and deliciously grape scented bath with the addition of purple bath friendly objects for play. 

Pink Lemonade Bath

Super fun pretend play--A pink lemonade stand themed bath! Complete with "pink lemonade" in a jug, cups, fake ice cubes, and pink lemonade bath paint. They more they poured, the more pink their bath became!

Black Zebra Bath

A super simple-to-set-up bath focusing on a zebra theme. 

A nice black and white contrast themed bath! 

To see all of our Color of the Week Activities, click HERE. 

and 

To see all of our Fun Baths, click the photo below! 

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Color of the Week: Gray

Welcome back to the 

Color of the Week Series 

here on Play Create Explore!

In our final week in this series we explored the color GRAY.  

I'll admit we didn't get into many activities that much this week. We've been a very busy family, but we did do a few activities this week centered around gray.

Gray 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.

Stormy Sky Painting

On an appropriately gloomy day, we mixed black and white paint to make gray so 

we could paint the stormy skys. The color mixing was part of the fun!

We added some blue to make raindrops. 

Gray Rice Sensory Bin
I used our homemade gray dyed rice to create this simple sensory bin.
To see how to color rice and noodles to use for sensory play, click HERE.

What else did we do?

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

--We identified gray everywhere we went. If something was gray, frequently I identified it and said it outloud. "The car is gray."  "The dog is gray." "What color her shirt? Her dress is gray!" 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 gray specifically!

We checked out these GRAY ANIMALS, 

We read our books with gray covers, themes, or characters...which meant LOTS of "Elephant and Piggie" books, by Mo Willems. 

-We watched THIS little story about Gray Flay on Youtube. (kinda silly and random, but L liked it)

Awesome Ideas From Others

Paper Plate Elephant Craft from Activity Village
Elephant Craft Printable from Learn Create Love

And that concludes our series! 

I hope you enjoyed our Color of the Week Series as much as we did! To see ALL of our color themed weeks and activities, click the photo below!

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Lid Art Magnets

My almost 5 year old and I made some super cool and one of a kind magnets for my mom as a Mother's Day gift. We are often bringing the kids art projects over to her house to adorn her fridge, but she only has a few magnets so we thought she could use some specially made by us, that double as mini art pieces as well!


I raided our lid collection, got some of our crafty bits out, a few glue guns, and some magnet rounds. After we glued our bits and pieces into the lids, I hot glued the magnets to the back. Easy peasy! I didn't take many pictures of the process because I was carefully watching and helping L with using the glue gun. He did surprisingly well..only a few glue gun burns, but that didn't stop him from making more and eventually he really got the hang of it. He felt like a "big boy" using mommy's craft tool.

**
You could also use regular white school glue, but they will just take a whole lot longer to dry.
However, if you have smaller kids, this could be a better option.

I just love them! 
Think we'll have to make a few more for ourselves :)

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Black Light Sensory Bin

I made a fun Black Light Sensory Bin for the boys just shortly after we did Black Light Painting which was SO.MUCH.FUN! I knew I wanted to do sensory bin too while we were still on the black light kick.

Black Light Painting

I used the neon aquarium gravel that we used in our Rainbow Sensory Bin, some glow in the dark aquarium rocks, glow sticks, a moon and star projector tap light, and other random things from around the house that were neon colored or white, or just that I thought would pick up the light well. Some things worked better or  brighter under the black light than others but the whole thing together glowed wonderfully and it was such a neat experience for the boys!

I set up a lamp (uncovered) with a black light bulb on the living room floor.
I put the bin on a sheet for easy cleanup.

The camera doesn't really pick up how much the neon aquarium rocks glow, but they were much brighter than what you see in the picture! 

Both boys had lots of fun! I didn't spend any money on materials. 

We already had the black light which we purchased from Lowe's fairly cheap. 

To see ALL of our Sensory Bins, 

Click the photo below!

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