5 Ways to Learn Colors with Picasso Tiles

Make learning colors hands on for your kids with these 5 simple Picasso Tiles activities.

We were kindly gifted a Picasso Tiles PT82 Set for purpose of review. We also used our existing tiles for some activities. This post contains affiliate links.

What you need:

- Picasso Tiles (we have the 100 piece set and the 82 piece set)
- pom poms (we used giant ones)
- colored craft sticks (we used jumbo ones)
- toy cars (we used Hot Wheels)

Before you start:

I did these five activities with my 1.5 year old daughter. It's important to remember to be patient and supportive, try not to take over! Offer guidance and lots of praise as your little one attempts to color match. It's all about exposure to learning opportunities, it's not about getting it right first time.

Use the Picasso tiles to make small colored containers. We did this on a magnetic vertical surface, but on the floor works well too. Encourage your child to sort pom poms into the correct color container.

Benefits include:
- fine and gross motor skill development
- core stability development due to working on a vertical surface
- sensory exploration of pom poms
- development of color recognition and vocabulary

If your child is finding it too easy, you can create staggered containers which requires greater control over movement and more detailed searching for the correct color.

Create large color boxes using the Picasso Tiles. For the lids, choose tiles which have holes in them. Present your child with the colored boxes and craft sticks and encourage them to color match by poking the sticks through the holes in the lids.

Benefits include:
- fine motor skill development
- problem solving and patience (trial and error of fitting the craft sticks through the holes)
- color recognition and vocabulary

If this activity is proving too easy for your child, you can challenge them to explore how to retrieve the craft sticks from the containers.

If your child loves cars like my little girl then this will definitely be a hit! Simply make large boxes using the Picasso Tiles, but leave one end open. You can stack several boxes to make it into a multilevel car park. Demonstrate to your child how to drive a car into the correct car park space.

Benefits include:
- this is another great one for developing fine and gross motor skills due to the child having to reach for the higher parking spaces
- placing the cars gently in the spaces is a good way to teach about spatial awareness and being delicate
- color recognition and vocabulary

If this is proving too easy, make the activity more challenging by stacking the parking spaces as a single tower. This will encourage your child to reach higher whilst maintaining control of their movements.

This one is super easy to set up and is all about encouraging color matching and gross motor movement. Simply arrange one of each color tile on a vertical magnetic surface. Provide your child with 4 or 5 tiles of each color and encourage them to stack them into color piles on the vertical surface.

Benefits include:
- great for encouraging your child to develop a strong core as they reach for the high color stacks
- working fine motor skills to neatly stack the tiles
- color recognition and vocabulary

As the stacks get bigger, they will get heavier and may start to slide down the vertical surface. This is a good opportunity to introduce the concept of weight to your child. You could experiment with how many you can add before the stack falls.

This one may seem a little silly but I guarantee your child will be mesmerized by it. Simply sit and experiment together by holding the tiles over your eyes to turn the world into different colors. You can even pull silly faces at each other!

Benefits include:
- such a great form of sensory exploration
- can link nicely with discussion work if you are doing it with older children (e.g. what can you see?)
- a very hands on way to introduce color vocabulary

Why not use this activity to start exploring color mixing by stacking the tiles?!

I hope you've gained some inspiration from this blog. Learning is so much more engaging for kids when it is hands on. Using a manipulative like Picasso Tiles is the perfect way to promote play based learning from an early age.