Roaming Rosie Reads “The Dog Who Loved Red” by Anitha Balachandran

Roaming Rosie Reads

The Dog Who Loved Red by Anitha Balachandran is one of my favorite Kane Miller picture books.

The illustrations are a bright and fun celebration of color.

The dog’s name is Raja and Raja loves red.  He even has “red radar.”  He chews on Mrs. Lal’s red shawl and Mr. Lal’s gray and red socks, but Raja’s favorite red thing to chew is the old red ball that he and his friend Champ play with.

The Dog Who Loved Red

But the red ball is lost.  Champ is sad.

Then Raja uses his red radar to locate their red ball in the neighbor’s backyard.  The neighbor, Mr. Mehta, doesn’t like dogs.  But Raja braves Mr. Mehta and his blue hose to retrieve the ball.

He’s quite the colorful mess at the end, which results in a bath for him and lots of laughs from your audience.

Kids love the adventurous story and there are a ton of colors mentioned for your Little Ones to find.

In the video below, you can watch me reading the book:

I’m sorry to announce that The Dog Who Loved Red is no longer available to purchase new from Usborne Books & More/Kane Miller, and but you can find many other wonderful picture books at my Usborne site, Books With Rosie.

HOWEVER, you can still buy The Dog Who Loved Red as a used book on Amazon.

You can also watch other videos of me reading story books in my Roaming Rosie Reads posts.

A few more picture books that I love:

Bears Don't Read One Night in the Zoo Acorns and Stew, Too The Children Who Loved Books

Happy Reading!

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Our Colorful Backyard: Color Matching Activity for Kids

Our Colorful Backyard:  Color Matching Activity for Kids

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:

Our Colorful Backyard:  Color Matching Activity for Kids

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:

colorful backyard buckets

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

Our Colorful Backyard:  Color Matching Activity for Kids

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

Our Colorful Backyard:  Color Matching Activity for Kids

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.  :)