Hungry Monster Color Sorters

It’s Wee Wednesday! Today I will share a fun color sorting activity that I did with my little ones this week using upcycled apple juice bottles.

We began focusing on colors a few weeks ago with our yellow unit, and now we have moved on to red. Now that we have spend time working with each color, I wanted to see if the twins were ready for sorting. The seed for this idea came from My HomeMade Montessori. Be sure to pay her site a visit for tons more home made Montessori-inspired activities.

To create the color sorters, I simply took two large plastic apple juice bottles and cut out the front panel with a kitchen knife. To color the sharp/scratchy edges, I found some yellow felt left over from my weather board activity and hot glued it around the opening of one bottle. For the red bottle, I used some red duct tape left over from my giant duct tape building blocks. At this point, I stepped back and decided that the openings looked like giant mouths, so I grabbed some giant google-eyes from my crafty stash, glued them on, and voila! Instant monsters. You could get super creative with the construction of your “monsters”- I created mine in about ten minutes during nap time, but wouldn’t it be fun to have your children help you make these?

When the monsters were done, I ran around the house with a basket and collected an array of red and yellow objects.

When the kiddos woke up, they found the monsters right away and spent some time checking them out. They had fun sticking various body parts inside the big “mouths.” For our listening pleasure, Little Man screamed “Yum! Yum! Yum!” in a deep monster voice for the better part of an hour

After they tired of trying to climb inside the monsters, I introduced my basket of goodies and let them have at it.

They had so much fun discovering all the different objects and feeding the monsters.

The activity morphed into a problem-solving exercise for Little Man, who decided he preferred putting objects into the top of the bottle instead of the mouth. Long after Toots had moved on to the playroom, Little Man was still testing items, figuring out which ones would fit into the small opening.

When he found one that worked, he was VERY happy! Later on, we played with these again, and Little Man turned the monsters on their “backs” and made a game of tossing/dropping the colored items into the mouths. All by himself!