We turned a beautiful stroll among the leaves into a chance for a little color review this morning.

And I mean stroll literally. Veronika was determined to push her doll around in a stroller “all by self”, crunching through autumn leaves. As we walked, we started a little collection of the most vibrant ones we could find.

Once home, I set up a quick “chart” for her. Divide a baking sheet into a 3×3 grid with masking tape. In the first column, I taped down three leaves: red, orange, and yellow.

In the second column, I had blank white squares of paper for Veronika to fill in with colors. I asked her what color each leaf was and then to find the matching crayon. To simplify this for a two year old, I only had out the three crayons we needed. You can make this more of a hunt through the whole pack for preschoolers!

She scribbled on the white squares for each. I also thought it was adorable that she wanted to use crayon directly on the leaves, for example, applying yellow crayon to yellow leaf.

Just for some extra early learning, I wrote the name of each color in the final column. Of course, she’s a long way off from sight reading, but it never hurts to start early!

This was a great project for extending a morning excursion into learning and play.