My children absolutely adore Little Blue and Little Yellow by Leo Lionni. The fact that it’s available in the board book version makes it so much easier for the little one to ‘read’ it on his own (i.e. flip through the book). I’ve borrowed this title countless times from the library and every time it never fails to please.
If you aren’t familiar with the book, Little blue and little yellow is about Little blue and his best friend Little Yellow. One day, they can’t find one another, and when they finally meet, they are overjoyed. They hug until they become green and when they return home, neither set of parents recognise them. Read the story to find out for yourself what happens. 🙂
So on to the activities we did for the reading of this book. Back when I was pregnant with my boy, here’s a simple activity I did with my girl.
First, we explored what happens when we mix paints (blue and yellow of course was one of the combinations):
And the colours ‘hug’:
Then I gave her a blob of blue finger paint and a blob of yellow finger paint on her palms and asked her what she thinks would happen when little blue palm and little yellow palm meet.
And boy did she enjoy squishing the paints in her hand as she demonstrated what happens when Little Blue and Little Yellow hug, using her palms. A great sensory activity if your little one isn’t adverse to paints.
Make coloured ice-cubes:
We’ve previously done mixing of colours too on a separate occasion using coloured ice-cubes (blue and yellow, as well as other colours). Make coloured ice-cubes using food colouring. Let the ice-cubes melt and watch the colours change.
Exploring Little Blue and Little Yellow with two kids:
Now that my boy is older (20months), he gets to take part in activities and I try to pitch activities at his level. Here are my two kids painting with blue and yellow. They started off with getting their palms all blue and they made a flower with their handprints… but well, you know the flowers don’t quite stay as flowers as the painting progressed.
My little one had so much fun with the paint he kept asking for more and we nearly used up the entire tube of paint!
And my girl, the seasoned ‘painter’ was as usual elated to be able to paint with her hands:
After this painting activity, my boy was able to recognise the colour blue and he could point at something blue and say its colour. I guess he must have picked it up while we were painting as we were constantly talking about both blue and yellow. 🙂
Since the kids were super dirty after the messy paint session, we went off for a shower and we continued with our activities for Little Blue and Little Yellow with shaving foam:
I gave each of them one small tray with the shaving foam and food colouring and they were to mix the colour evenly:
And they were free to paint the bathroom walls and shower screen with the coloured foam:
I couldn’t resist playing with the foam too… not when the colours were so pretty!:
Scooping and mixing coloured water:
This is an activity that’s great for kids because they seem to always be so engrossed when it comes to playing with water. I gave them two big bowls of two different colours (blue and yellow in this case) and provided them with scoops and small plastic jugs.
And that earned me at least half an hour of time to myself!
These activities take no time at all for setting up so do give them a try when you pick up this book from the library!
View our other literature-based learning posts if you’ve found this useful! 🙂
If you like this post, please hop over to my Facebook page where I connect with my readers and I would love to have you following my newly set up social media accounts – Pinterest, Twitter and Instagram. 🙂