As you all know, we love singing and signing about colours, but we also love reading stories with colourful themes. This story about a little child discovering lots of colourful farm animals introduces some perfect EY vocabulary in a fun way!
As with so many of the books we like to sign, this story has a delightful, repetitive refrain which helps to encourage children to sign along and join in. So that you can make the most of this story and embed the signs in multiple ways, we’ve also included a new colour song below with some other song ideas and some colour games too. Enjoy!
To tie in with this colourful theme, there are lots of fantastic colour songs in our Singing Hands repertoire – you have our two different rainbow songs, If You’re Wearing Red, Down on Grandpa’s Farm, Yellow Bird, Mmm Frog, You are my Sunshine to name just a few – you can find them all on our DVDs and CDs. However, we thought you might also like a new little tune – so here we are with our flute-playing tutor Debbie singing and signing ‘Orange is a Carrot’ – have a go at signing along!
Don’t forget, we also have our Topic Video of colours if you are considering a colour topic theme at your setting – this includes all the colours hopefully you’ll ever need!
To finish off this colourful topic, there are lots of creative ways that you can play with colour. We love using different coloured playdough and cutters to cut out a red cow, brown horse, green duck and match these to the pictures. But here are some other ways to incorporate Makaton symbols into your play too.
We used Widgit software (with our Makaton vocabulary disks) to create two different lotto games with the same set of six Makaton symbols for the animals within the book. For one game we took pictures of the animals in the book and matched them to the symbols. We then played again using small toy animals/objects of reference.
For the next set of games, we focused on the colours within the story. There are endless options, but some ideas include matching the Makaton animal symbol to the relevant colour, matching the book images to the relevant colour and then matching colourful objects (in this case buttons) to the colour lotto board.
Don’t forget, whilst you’re reading the story, you can also hand out coloured pom-poms and scarves to add a tactile element to the colours within the story too.
Hope you enjoyed the story, the song and the colour game ideas. Let us know what you think!
Happy signing!
SMI x