Colores en Espanol!

For Spanish for Preschoolers this week I relied heavily on this lesson from Discovering the World Through My Son's Eyes with "Oso Pardo, Oso Pardo" (Brown Bear, Brown Bear) by Eric Carle.

We started the lesson with some color sorting.  I have three big cans covered in colored duct tape.  I gathered rojo, azul y amarillo (red, blue and yellow) items from around the house and had the kids take turns picking an item and putting it in the same color can while saying the name of the color.  As I mentioned last week some of the kids don't know their colors yet in English or Spanish so it was a great learning activity.

Then we read "Oso Pardo, Oso Pardo".  I loved how the book has a built in review on the last page so we could practice all the colors again.  I printed out the templates from the same location as Discovering the World Through My Son's Eyes.  I didn't have color flash cards so I just cut squares of construction paper and we went through the animals one at a time so each child had a chance to match one to the right color.  Chiquita had a very hard time not answering every single time (seems she inherited some know-it-all genes from Mommy).

Then I had each child pick an animal to paint with the appropriate color but they had to ask for it in Spanish!  Chiquita and another girl both wanted the gato morado (purple cat) so I had to make a last minute copy, thank goodness my all-in-one printer was in the next room.

I tried to end the lesson by singing "De Colores" a beautiful Mexican folksong about colors in the springtime.  None of the kids got into it, so we did "Por este pampita" instead.

It's a baby song, like the "Five Piggies" we do with toes, but Chiquita still loves it and I've found these little games are fun for a long time.   It goes like this:

Por este pampita (start with two fingers at the child's wrist)

pasó un venadito (move up to the elbow)

buscando aguita (to the upper arm)

por este posita! (give a little tickle under their arm)

The translation is: 

Through this field 

came a little deer 

looking for a little water 

by this little spring!

The kids loved it!