What kid doesn’t love playing with the paint swatches at Home Depot while you’re trying to pick up brushes and wait for your custom-matched color to be mixed and shaken? Heck, I love the paint swatches.
While I love the nature scavenger sheets I find everywhere (Last week, Mt. Diablo had some simple ones in their visitor’s center for the taking), the deal is, my kids a) mark them off in two seconds flat, and b) aren’t into carrying a clipboard and paper and pencil on our walk. So the sheets aren’t terribly practical for walks. Who can blame them? Carrying a clipboard while you walk kind of isn’t the point.
So, lo and behold the perfect solution: paint swatch cards and kids.
Carry a collection of paint swatches you picked out, and have your kids find colors that match them on your hike.
Hole punch the cards and hold them with twine, a key ring, or a carabiner.
We used them to find wildflower colors and trees; grass, dirt, and the sky. Sometimes we didn’t have an exact color swatch for something we found. The poppy didn’t quite have a match in our deck. So we talked about that– the differences. The poppy is brighter; the name of that particular swatch and what else might match it.
A friend who was a Montessori teacher told me, “This is a great activity in broadening the child’s language experience (analogies and similes) and expands on vocabulary development. It’d even go as far as indirectly preparing them for writing when they’ll be asked to used details in creative writing! Super cool! Second, they’re making comparisons–another indirect preparation to work such as working in math/science.”
After putting this into practical use, here are a few notes from experience:
- I got two sets of each swatch for both kids.
- My older son (age 8) liked this MUCH more than my younger one (age 4), which was surprising.
- I tied the cards together with a piece of twine, but that quickly became twisted and tangled. Use a carabiner or a keychain ring. Much easier.
There were many more things to do with these cards than simply matching colors to nature, and I’m pleased to say my 8-year-old was the one to see the potential. In the car home from Home Depot, he started playing games with the colors. Here are a few:
- Who can find the brightest color
- Who can find the darkest or lightest of a color, like green
- Who has the happiest or saddest color
- Who has a color that reminds you of…. (anything: pie, nature, good times, sad times, angry times, love, etc)
I hope you like this if you hadn’t heard of it, and that you’re inspired to do this too. It’s so simple…and the possibilities with the colors are limitless. What do you think? Leave a comment and let me know if you’ve tried this!