Builds on: math, color recognition, fine motor skills
What you'll need:
1 empty cardboard egg carton
green, purple, yellow and orange pipe cleaners
wire cutters
large exacto knife
The Carrot Seed by Ruth Krauss
* optional: 1 bag of Rainbow Carrots from the health food store
What to do:
Turn the egg carton over so that the egg cups are facing up. Use the exacto knife to cut and X into the center of each cup. Use a pencil to force the X open a little more.
Use the wire cutters to cut the all the pipe cleaners into 2 inch pieces. To create a carrot take a green pipe cleaner and a purple pipe cleaner fold them each in half. Twist the two ends of the purple pipe cleaner together to so that you have a loop at the folded end and a point at the twisted end. Finally, thread the green pipe cleaner through the loop of the purple pipe cleaner and twist close to the loop leaving the ends untwisted for the stocks of the carrots. Repeat with all of your other colors until you have 12. Let your Roo have a shot at it to improve their fine motor skills and hand dexterity.
Once you have them all made push the pointed ends through the holes of the egg cups and place it on the activities table. Once you've read The Carrot Seed you can let your Roo pull out all of the carrots and put them back in. Challenge them with color sorting, counting or color pattern questions.
My favorite part about this activity is that kids always comment that carrots are only orange. I get to pull out Rainbow Carrots and explain that there are lots of different colors for carrots and at snack we test all of the different colors to see if they taste any different from the typical orange ones.
Addition activities:
Follow the links below for some of some more carrot activities, by some other awesome bloggers, to go allow with The Carrot Seed
Soda Bottle Carrots: A Very Small Kitchen Garden
Spring Sensory Tub With Carrots
Carrot Fingers
Preschool Carrot Patch Math Activity
