Make Your Own Learning Games: Color Sorting and Matching Box

Whether or not you are homeschooling, many education games will keep your little ones entertained for hours. One of ours is this color sorting and matching game. And since we've found boxes that the egg-carton base fits in, it's just gotten better ;-)

You can either start with a 1 1/2 dozen carton- cut in half, or cut down a bigger 2+ flat into a 3x3 square.

I used to keep my egg-carton games (I have more I'll be sharing...) in gallon zipper bags, but I recently discovered that they fit PERFECTLY into the Twinings' 50-count boxes. I knew I saved them for a reason!

What your egg-cartons are made of will determine what you use to paint your wells with. I used old-ish nail polish fine in these cardboard ones. But that will eat Styrofoam ones, so use plain ol' craft paint.

Randomly paint the bottoms of each well with one color. Here I have white, , pink, orange, red, yellow, purple (looks blue on here!), blue, green, and black. I've used brown before when we've had trouble finding little black items to sort.

Next, gather items to sort. If you have really small ones, be very careful in case they get into and mouth the preschooler's game!

We have pompoms, beads, bits of ribbon, little erasers, etc. We were still gathering when this picture was taken and later for black we also added a lego, a tiny tire, small checker piece. (Just to give you ideas!)

We put them in a snack-sized baggie, and it fits perfectly in the box too. You can also add for extra manipulation activities, large tweezers or a clothespin to pick up items &/or a plastic spoon for scooping.

Little ones love this game because they can "play" it however they want! Any way to meet the objective of sorting the object into their colored wells works!