Today we spent some time exploring the colors in our backyard.

A bit of a colorful treasure hunt, really.

We collected items in various colors and placed them in matching paper boxes.  We gathered leaves, grass, flowers, mulch, moss, and rocks.  But the photos don’t even show everything we found, because we got distracted by a friendly ladybug, and when we went back out to get more flowers, I forgot my camera.  :)

Either way, here are some of the things we found:

All of these boxes were made from construction paper and tape.

I picked out construction paper in brown, orange, green, purple, red, and white.  Then I took my scissors and cut a slit in towards the center at each corner.  Then I folded up the sides, wrapping the edges of the short ends on the outside of the long ends, and taping them together.

Kinda like this:

It’s not sturdy for long-term play, or to hold heavy items, but it worked perfectly for this activity.

And here is our little ladybug friend, hanging out on my daughter’s fingers:

You can still do this color identifying activity even if you don’t have a backyard.  Bring the paper buckets to the park instead, or use heavy-duty beach buckets in different colors to collect toys around the house.  Or just wrap some pieces of colored construction paper around existing buckets.

Not crafty at all?  Just lay the construction paper on the ground (on a non-windy day) and let your kids place their collections right on top of the paper in piles.

Either way, the point is to have fun exploring the backyard (garden/park/etc) and not fussing about the container in which they’ll collect their treasures.  :)