A Quick Montessori DIY (Color Tablets)

     Before we left for Kenya I made several trips to Lowe's and Home Depot for one thing of another.  While there I picked out two things thinking to myself that they may be useful at some point.  The first were the free paint stirrers from Home Depot.  I've used a few of those already for a project I did for our co-op.  Secondly, I picked up paint chips.  The ones I happened to pick up were the ones with four related colors on each card.

     These cards have worked great as quick and easy color tablets!  Color tablets are a Montessori work that helps the child with color discrimination among other things including color vocabulary as you will be using words such as shades, gradation, darkest, lightest, etc.   Click here for a sample presentation of all three color tablet boxes and here for color tablet games and extensions.
      I separated the colors of each card as they came four shades on each color sample card.  My littlest sorts the cards by color and from darkest to lightest (as in color tablet box 3).  I love that the cards are a heavy card stock and so won't tear easily.   I only wish I had gotten a greater variety of shades as there should be seven gradations of each of the primary, secondary and tertiary colors included in the tablet box.   This is something that can easily be done at home for children as young as 2 1/2 and can save over a hundred dollars by avoiding buying all three color tablet boxes.

     Other diy tablet box ideas can be found here from Planting Peas and here at Montessori Monday.  Many diy color tablet projects require printing the color squares and then affixing the paper to wood, or painting pieces of wood. This turns out beautifully, but color ink is precious in our house and a project like this would use a lot of it.  For our purpose, given that our little one is an older preschooler, who has previously seen these tablets at his school, the paper cards work well.  Also, if you like the heaviness of the wood tablets, I bet you could find all the shades needed at Lowe's or Home Depot.  That way, instead of printing, you could use the paint chips to affix to the wood pieces. You would in that way avoid printing or painting!