Here's an activity that I made to reinforce colour recognition and counting.
I cut out the seahorse shapes using a template I found on the internet. The template was for twenty seahorses for a counting activity but I decided to use them (mainly) for colour recognition. I used felt but paper or foam would be fine too. I was intending to draw some eyes on them but Ryan already recognised them as seahorses and couldn't wait to start playing with them, so I didn't bother. Ryan was introduced to seahorses when we looked at sea creatures and also when we read Eric Carle's book, Mister Seahorse.
We play with these in a number of ways. Ryan will pick each seahorse up and say its colour (he actually did this naturally the first time he played with them, without any prompting from me). As he picks each one up and says its colour, he will also arrange them in a line.
Alternatively, I will arrange the seahorses in a line and get him to pass them to me one by one, based on their colour. I will ask, "Please give me the orange one" or "Where's the beige one?". Once the seahorses are all in a row, I will repeat the exercise by asking similar questions - "Which is the pink seahorse?" or "Show me the green one".
You can also make two sets of seahorses (ie. two blue ones, two red ones, etc.) and use them to play a colour matching game. Another idea is to ask your child to sort them by colour families - you can see from the photo that we have a dark green baby seahorse and a light green one, a brown one and a beige one, a dark orange and a light orange one - these can be paired up and you can teach colour gradation that way.
We do use them to count too. Obviously, the more seahorses you make, the more you can count up to.
Simple activity to make and lots of ways to play!
