Here’s a fun way for toddlers to learn colors on a BIG scale. The only limit to this game, really, is how many cans of food you have in your pantry!

I happened to have seven cans which worked well since I didn’t want to overwhelm Veronika by using more than 2 or 3 sheets of paper for each color. Older kids, though, might have a blast setting up a maze of colors that covers a whole living room if your pantry has enough supplies!

To set up, I picked three colors (blue, red, and green) and set down two to three pieces of construction paper for each one. I topped each sheet with a can. These cans have dual purpose: to hold the paper down and to wrap yarn around in the next step.

I then set out lengths of yarn in colors corresponding to the sheets of paper. Wrap the end of each color around one can. Your child’s job is to take that yarn and connect it to all the cans sitting on the same color (so red yarn stretching to all the red pages, green yarn to all the green pages, and so forth).

When I first brought Veronika over to the set-up, I worried I had made a mistake and she was too young for the activity. She was very excited by the cans (“It’s beans!”) and distracted by checking them out. When I asked her what color the paper was, she only wanted to tell me what color the food item was.

But then we had a breakthrough. She correctly identified that the paper underneath the can was red. Could she hold the yarn and find another pieces of paper of the same color. “I think you see it!” I told her.

“I see it!” she responded, and trotted to the second piece of red paper. I showed her how to wind her red yarn around this can.

Time for a round of green yarn!

“I see it!” She trotted over…

…and proudly looped the green yarn around.

Once we were finished attaching all the yarn and cans, we had a neat maze along the floor. “It’s a spider web,” she said with excitement, and wanted to play and jump over the yarn maze for quite some time.

So we accidentally got in our gross motor skills for the day, too!