This is a great activity for a toddler who has just learned his or her colors, and it’s quite simple to set up. I laid out pieces of construction paper, and for each one I tore up scraps of paper in the same color and arranged them on a tray.

So as not to overwhelm your toddler with too many colors at once, I recommend starting with one background color at a time. “What color?” I asked her, pointing to the paper. “Red!” she said.

She was way more into the glue stick I gave her than in selecting which color of scraps to add from the tray, but I guided her back when I could. “Let’s add the red scraps!” I suggested simply, reinforcing her knowledge that the paper was red.

In this way, she worked through adding red scraps to red paper, yellow scraps to yellow paper, and so on.

Towards the end, I made it sightly harder and showed held up a scrap of paper. “Which color should we glue this one on?” I asked. She’d gotten the gist, now, to glue green onto green.

So as the title suggests, this activity was simple to set up, simple for a toddler to do, and simple to clean up. The trifecta!