a fun, Fribbit-y coloring contest for kids
April 26th, 2009
If you have kids ages 13 and under, they have until Monday April 27th to enter Brenda’s fun coloring contest! Just go to this post for instructions! There are cool prizes (buckets of art supplies!) for two age groups. You can actually still enter if you’re over age 13, you just won’t win a prize. And if you don’t want to enter the contest, well, you can still go download the free PDF for a fun coloring sheet.
Or you can even sneak in a little edumacation with it. Heather and Sue mentioned to me when they were here last week that one big thing in kindergarten is the kids have to learn the names of colors. Then the other day we walked over to the playground at our neighborhood elementary school and I noticed the rainbow art projects on the kindergarten bulletin board, with each color’s name printed out three times and circled with the matching color.
I don’t consider myself an “official” homeschooler yet since Annalie won’t be in kindergarten till this fall. But I thought this coloring sheet was perfect for a color-by-numbers. So I just made a quick chart on another piece of paper and wrote corresponding numbers on the coloring sheet. Annalie sounded out the color names with a tiny bit of help and circled each one with a marker before finding that number on the sheet and coloring those areas in.
She got a little tired of coloring after a couple of colors, so we set the sheet aside and came back to it the next day. Even then, she got bored with coloring in large areas so I suggested she could just use stripes and dots. I even talked to her a little bit about pointilism and showed her how that worked on another piece of paper. She thought that was pretty cool. I also suggested she could add more flowers or a sunshine, so she added her trademark smiley sun (yellow for the face and rays, red for the features).
At one point Annalie even threw in some math without any prompting from me, counting how many colors she’d already done, and how many more she had left, and adding them up (“Four colors done, three left to do…that makes seven! Four plus three is seven!”) to figure out how many colors she was using altogether. She has been surprising us more and more lately by adding numbers up in her head, so I’ve been doing my best to encourage it. I keep telling her that since her daddy is really good at math, and I’m pretty good at math too, she will probably be a math whiz. Take THAT, Barbie!
p.s. I have so many photos from the past few days I need to edit and upload, but I’ve been busy lately working on the 2009-2010 edition of the calendar we give our moms and Annalie’s godparents for Mother’s Day every year. You can see the 2008-2009 version on Flickr, if you’re curious. I hope to catch up on my photos soon, now that the calendar is done and ordered, using my new MacBook Pro (on which I’m typing right now) for most of that editing! That sound you heard was all my Mac-loving friends cheering.
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That sound included me!! Isn’t everything on a mac so much easier? lol.
I’ve been using your bowl for everything I possibly can. I adore it. It makes me smile every time I use it.
Math was definitely never my strong point. My mom focused way more on reading, probably because it’s easier to incorporate reading lessons into day to day life but not quite as easy with math. Yay for you for finding a way and getting a head start! and Yay for Annalie for being such a good pupil!
wooooooooooooo!!!!!!!! I can’t believe you did it! The coloring and math is great but the mac conversion is even better!!!!!!
Wow, Annalie is one smart cookie! That’s so funny – I made the conversion to a Macbook this week too and am completely smitten with it! I can’t believe I waited this long to get one. Lucky you though getting the Pro!
Jillian – Things aren’t much easier yet, since I’ve only been using the Mac for a few hours. I expect it’ll annoy and frustrate the snot outta me for a month or so, and then I’ll love it. That’s pretty much how it went when I got my DSLR. And what, math not easy to work into day to day life!? There’s math all over the place! You just have to look for it! Which, admittedly, you’re probably not doing if you’re not a math geek. ;-)
SAJ – It’s mostly because I’ve been occasionally using your Mac for the past year that I finally did it. I figured the initial “Acckkk, how do I do that!!?” wouldn’t be as bad since I have figured a lot of that out recently on your laptop!
Melissa – When it comes to computers, PC or Mac, I pretty much get what Troy tells me. I trust his computerly judgement.
We’re going to be doing our coloring contests today. We’ve been too busy birthdaying lately!
I’d love to get a Mac. Maybe when I’m a famous blogger and make $40,000 a month like Dooce, I can get one. But, since it’s not exactly my goal to be famous, and I doubt I’ll EVER make $40,000 a month doing ANYTHING, maybe I’ll just have to start saving :)
Great job Annalie!!! And to Mom for turning it edumacational (as a good friend of mine says when she is trying to hide the education part of fun at home).
And congrats to you Bethany for making the break to a MacBook Pro. You are going to love it. I won’t go back now, I just won’t.
Are you using the picture of Annalie in the shopping cart for your calendar?? That image pops in my head everytime I see one of the car carts!!
color by numbers are great and you can make them math problems too! Kailyn was bored with just sounding out the colors but was facinated by addition.
Also thanks for the calendar link, I had done this in the past and just found it over welming the last two years now my goal is to get back on track this year that gives me about a week to get it done.