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Home » Activities » Science » Fun & Easy – Teach Color Mixing & Math

Fun & Easy – Teach Color Mixing & Math

This post may contain affiliate links. See my disclosure .

Here is an easy, hands on way to teach color mixing and a math concept to your toddler or preschooler. The best part is that the activity involves moving their bodies, which always seems to help my little guy really, truly understand a new concept.

The other day my 2.5 year old and I were drawing and coloring. He drew something and said, “look, mama, a triangle!” Then I drew a triangle on that triangle and another way to make a star. Then something hit me. I was using red, he was using blue and we started seeing purple as our crayons met on the page.

So I drew two big circles with a slight overlap, a Venn Diagram. “What’s that, Mama?” he asked. I told him and he repeated the words back to me registering the new vocabulary. Kids are amazing as you watch their brains work and process the world.

teach kids math with a venn diagram

Teach Color Mixing & Math

Then I took a step back. I drew one smaller red circle and one smaller blue circle. I described what I was doing to him. Then I pointed out the larger red and blue circles and where they overlap we get a new color, purple.

He jumped up and started running around the room (the movement!) collecting red, blue, and purple items

We both began to collect items around us placing the blue items on the blue circle and the red items on the red circle, and, finally, the purple items on the purple “oval” or overlap.

Venn Diagram Color Mixing

Easy, right? This activity was a spur of the moment so can obviously be presented in a neater fashion. The spontaneity worked for us. Some days are just like that…

Thanks for visiting!
Marnie

Tagged With: Infant & Toddler, Math, Preschool, Sensory

About Marnie Craycroft

Marnie hails from Maine where she spent summers buried in sand and winters buried in snow. She is the daughter of a nearly four decade veteran of the public school systems. Teaching has always been a part of her life. She founded Carrots Are Orange in 2010.

Carrots Are Orange is a Montessori learning and living website for parents and teachers.

Marnie graduated from Wesleyan University in 1999 with a BA in Economics. She spent nearly a decade working in investment management. In 2006, she earned her MA in business from the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business.

Marnie moved to the west coast in 1999 and currently lives in Boulder with her husband and three sons. She is Montessori trained. Her work has been featured on Apartment Therapy, Buzzfeed, PBS Kids, BabyCenter, the Melissa & Doug blog, Huffington Post, and WhattoExpect.com. Besides writing, passions include running (usually after her three sons), photography, and outdoor adventures.

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