Learning with Paint Samples

I’ve always loved those paint chip samples you can find in the hardware stores…  I remember collecting handfuls of them as a kid whenever I got a chance.

That love for the colorful strips hasn’t ended, and lately we’ve been having fun using them in some colorful learning activities.

The first thing we did with them was a simple color-matching activity. (This would make a great busy bag to throw in your purse for toddlers when going to doctor’s appointments, etc.)  All you need are 2 matching strips.  Cut one strip and have your child match the colors to the colors on the strip that is left uncut.  You could put several sets in your busy bag to add to the difficulty level.

The next thing I made with paint chips was a fun ABC train.  For this you need a bunch of those large paint sample cards.  Cut one to look like a train engine and choose one uppercase letter to write on it.  The next “train car” will need the matching lowercase letter and another uppercase letter.  Continue this for as many letters as you want your train to have.

Since I have 2 preschoolers, I made 2 different trains.  Neither of them uses all the letters yet, but I can easily add more letters to each train as their skill level improves.  This makes matching upper and lower case letters up much more fun than typical flashcards or worksheets — my son especially loves his ABC train!

Finally, we have been using paint samples to work on word families.

I collected large paint sample strips (with 3 colors each) and coordinating longer paint sample strips to do this one.

On the large paint sample I wrote the last 2 letters of the word family I wanted to work on.  I also cut 2 slits to feed the longer paint strip through.  (I trimmed the strips down a bit first, making them a bit more narrow.)

On the longer strip I wrote one letter on each “square” of paint to create the words when threaded through the larger square.

Those are just a few of the things we’ve done with my collection of paint samples.

There are a few crafts I’d love to share, too…  But that’s for another post.

Have you gotten creative with paint samples?