Early Childhood Education Resources: Make a Turkey Book that Teaches Colors

Wednesday, November 2, 2005

Make a Turkey Book that Teaches Colors

This idea is based on the Brown Bear, Brown Bear book.

First you will need a turkey template to cut out and color. Here are a few nice ones:

Large Turkey

Turkey Coloring Page

Realistic Turkey (for those of you that dislike the cartoony looking line art, but keep in mind you'll be coloring them with bright colors)

I used a pattern that came out of a book, but you can freehand one if you're a good artist. I'm not. :)

You should think about what size your book will be before printing. You can make it two pages per sheet of paper and fold it or make a big book with one page per sheet. You may need to shrink your template on the copy machine or on your computer before printing.

What I did was use 2 sheets per page. I printed and colored my turkeys and hand lettered the book with, "BLUE turkey, BLUE turkey, what do you see?" (You have to start the book with the question, then the page following can have the answer, "I see a RED turkey looking at me." And then you have a "turkey" page saying, "RED turkey, RED turkey, what do you see?" And then on the next page, "I see a GREEN turkey looking at me." and then on the next page, "GREEN turkey, GREEN turkey, what do you see?" Continue until you've exhausted all your "color" options.

I mounted the pages on construction paper that was slightly larger and then covered with contact paper. Then I punched three holes along the side and held it all together with yarn.

If you are doing this book for toddlers, then you can stick to basic colors like blue, red, green, yellow... and keep the book short.

If you are doing it for older children, they will probably still enjoy the story, since it's a familiar favorite... but you can use more "advanced" colors such as lavender, fuschia, turquoise, etc.

I put the color names in all caps matching the color to help aid with sight recognition as well, which is good even for toddlers. You may not think they're getting it, but I've seen many children in my care recognize the word by sight somewhere else, long after we were done reading the book.

Here are some images:

Gluing the pages to construction paper