Mommy Preschool: Train Color Sorting

Recently I had a friend in my neighborhood ask if Luke was in preschool yet. Sometimes people think Luke is 3 already when really he won't be 3 until March. Either way, I told her no and was surprised at her question because I thought kids only went to preschool for the year prior to kindergarten. Apparently I missed the memo because most preschools will start accepting children at age 3. Well I started to panic at my lack of information thinking I was going to stunt Luke's mental growth by a year or something. After looking into it. I decided that he doesn't need to go to a preschool for 2 years. He can go the year before kindergarten and learn how to be a school student and I can teach him the things he should be learning until then. Financially, it doesn't really fit into the budget right now when I can teach him a lot at this point. I understand that there are a lot of social things, etc. he will learn only from going to a preschool away from me, but one extra year of preschool isn't going to make that big of a difference in my opinion.

With that said, I started looking into activities to make to help Luke have some constructive learning time. One thing that has bothered me for a while now is that he doesn't know his colors. He can say the words, and he prefers the color blue, however, if he is asked what color his blue bowl is, he will randomly shout out a color with pride. I know he isn't even 3 so I shouldn't worry too much about it. I think he mostly doesn't care to call it the correct color yet. That is how things have been his whole life. If he hasn't cared about it, he resists my teaching attempts and refuses to learn what I'm trying to teach him. I've worked on colors with him for a long time now and though he has the words learned, he still refuses to say them with the correct color on purpose (he sometimes guesses right but will use the same color word to describe the next object as well).

I found color sorting activities from this blog through Pinterest. I liked the idea of sorting colored objects onto colored train cars because Luke is in train phase (along with fire trucks, police cars, trucks... you name the vehicle and he likes it). So I went looking for a simple train I could use and found this downloadable version but after I downloaded I found in reading the document that the graphics actually came from here.

So anyway, I printed off the graphics and traced around them onto craft foam and cut them out and attached them to a craft plastic grid mesh I found on the craft isle at Walmart a long time ago. Well I used a thick white string and crochet needle to attach the foam. Then I cut out shapes from the left over foam. Luke is loving it. I have to work with him on it though because so far he's really good at putting the colored shape in the correct colored train but he mostly just wants to say, "this one in here, this one in here..." and when I ask him what color he's still guessing but I'm sure he'll get it with time. It's nice because he's also learning his shapes. I'll make more things for him to sort over time like letters, numbers, animals etc. But for now this is enough to work on.