Color Book Fun!

Usually when LM colors in his color book, it usually looks something like the picture above. Freestyle art in its greatest form! It is really fun to see how his little mind works as he goes from color to color, and tests them out. And since it is his color book, anything goes!

I've recently discovered that within these color-splashed pages are ALSO some great opportunities for learning. Here are 3 that we've done so far:

1.  We took a simple picture, and instead of coloring it,  searched for SHAPES! I outlined the shapes as we found them. LM knows his shapes pretty well now, and so he could identify most of these. They are not perfect squares, circles, and ovals, etc., but it was a good experience for LM to practice recognizing shapes in objects. Since then, he has surprised me with what shapes he recognizes in the world around him. He especially loves the Oval shape and points it out often.

 2. Another fun color book activity was using the Word Search grids as a Letter Search game. I would ask him, "Can you find an M?" and he would color over it with his crayon.

 3. And finally, since LM is in a phase where he loves to copy what we do, I used a picture that had 2 of everything and Mommy colored one of each while LM colored the others. When I colored my shoes blue, he colored his shoes blue. He loved copying what I did and did really good at coloring an actual object rather than just scribbling all over the page. (I colored the guy on the right, LM colored the girl on the left.)

Any other fun Color Book ideas out there?