A simple 3d Colour by number activity for your preschooler to practice their fine motor skills, number recognition and cognitive development.
Suitable for: 3 Years +
Set up: A while!
Resources
- Card Board
- Kitchen Roll Tubes
- Hot Glue Gun and Glue Sticks
- Coloured Pen
- Matching Pompoms To Your Pens
- Pencil
- Ruler
The set up
Draw out a rough mermaid tail onto your card board with a pencil. Cut the kitchen rolls in half length ways so you have two long strips. Lay a ruler along the length of each strips and draw a mark where evert inch is, now cut the lengths of kitchen roll where you have added your marks. You should end up with lots of U shaped strips. Use the hot glue gun to glue the strips down to make them look like scales, trimming the strips when needed. Fill in any gap with spare kitchen roll so your pompoms can’t escape.
Use a pen to write the numbers in each scale I just used three numbers but you can use as many as you like. Find three different colours of pompoms and write out the colour by number instructions.
Playing With The Activity
Ayla loves filling and emptying things so I thought this one would be a winning but she wasn’t hugely interested! She did about 4 scales before she began scooping the pompoms into the holes wherever they would land, she was tired and grumpy when I showed her the activity though so I will leave it out a little longer to see if is peeks any further interest.
While Ayla was focused I encouraged her to look at the colour scale so we could work out what number we were finding, she correctly found the numbers in each time as I reminded her which each number was. “That’s a number 1. Can you find a number one on her tail?”
Activities Like This Are Great For;
Promoting number recognition skills
Building on their fine motor skills
Developing their concentration
Encouraging them to listen to instructions