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Zoo Coloring Book

After reading, Rooster's Off to See the World by Eric Carle, I pulled out our Zoo Coloring Book. We took the chicken page out and discussed how a female chicken is a hen and a male is a rooster. Then I asked him to get his rooster toy to look at what color we should color our picture. We also looked at the picture of the rooster  in the book. 
He got distracted and played a little but that is what this time is about! I let him play until he was ready to come back over to color. The coloring book did not go exactly as planned. I had initially wanted to take our zoo pictures and make them into sketches using photoshop. But after my hard drive was burnt I have not taken the time to reload the photoshop program. I do use PICNIK.COM a free and very user friendly program to edit pictures. I tried the sketch application on picnik but I was not happy with the results. I felt the pictures looked too abstract for Jake to benefit. So I just ended up making the coloring book in black and white. This works a lot better for us at Jake's age. I will certainly use the sketch application to make coloring pages in the future. I think it will work better with pictures that are not so detailed (diverse background). 
If you would like to use our coloring book you can get it here:
Zoo Coloring Book
Jake did come back to color the hen. I am trying to encourage him to color using the true colors of the animals but I am not limiting him. I suggest he use the correct colors but ultimately leave it up to him to choose.
He is not coloring the entire picture of the animals and backgrounds at this point but I am happy that we can use the pictures to reiterate what we are working on. I try to pull a picture out to connect with an activity or a story we read. We color just about everyday. As stated when introducing the monthly plans, the activities are meant to be completed over and over because repetition is key! 


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  1. Deceptively EducationalJuly 15, 2011 at 5:44 PM

    Great idea! Checking your post out from the Smart Summer Challenge linky.

    ReplyDelete
  2. teachmamaJuly 15, 2011 at 7:49 PM

    great! thanks for sharing this resource and activity idea in our smart summer challenge! sometimes we have to roll with the punches--sorry about your harddrive, my friend!

    ReplyDelete

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