I love throwing a little learning into even vacation days with a toddler, and here is a game that you can literally play anywhere. Simply ask your child to find something of a certain color, then start counting dramatically down from 10 to 0 until they run and touch it.

I demonstrated for Veronika the first time through, naming the brown clock and then doing a big happy run over to it. Ten, nine, eight…

She giggled and wanted to play along. Could she touch orange?

Could she touch green?

Yes!

You can see how easy and obvious the game is, which means it can easily occupy fussy toddlers just about anywhere.

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!

These easy DIY color flashcards are similar to a set I made for Veronika last week, that time featuring shapes. This time, I likewise covered construction paper with sticky contact paper for durability, and then cut two squares from each color. I wanted all the shapes to be uniform, because the test now was on colors!

I laid all the squares in front of Veronika and held up one green. If I had a green, could she find the match?

It was interesting to watch her go through this game, as it made clear which colors she knows and which she still guesses. She mixes up blue and green, for example, as well as red and orange, but she has a solid grasp on yellow, pink, and white!

Honestly the game didn’t interest her nearly as long as the shape version. But since the squares fit neatly into a zip-top bag, and I can pull these out again and again, the older she gets and the better she knows her colors!