37 Fun Activities for Teaching Color Words

Once children have learned to identify colors, it’s time to teach them to read color words. While learning to read color words happens from repetition, there are plenty of fun activities, games, and printables available to make it fun for the kids.

Whether you are at home teaching your kids, or in the classroom teaching PreK, Kindergarten, or First grade, you will love these awesome activities for teaching color words.

Color Words Games

Flashcards and worksheets are good as a concrete way to practice learning color words. Color games and puzzles, on the other hand, are excellent ways to get kids learning about colors and color words through a hand-on, kinesthetic, approach.

Below is a video of my daughter and her friends demonstrating how to play Fish Food – a fun game to practice colors.

If you’re looking for games to practice color words, or color puzzles, check out the list below. These are some of the top-rated educational resources on amazon for color games. Do you have a favorite game or puzzle that isn’t listed below? If so, leave me a comment at the end of this blog post, and I’d be glad to add it to the list.

List of Color Games and Puzzles

Jumbo Color Bears: Great for sorting by color, color matching, and counting.
I Have, Who Has Colors
Color Bean Bags: Perfect for interactive play
Color Matching Peg Board: Great for fine motor and color matching
Fish Food: An Electronic Color Game (featured below)
Rainbow Sorting Crayons with Toys: Great for sensory play.
Fish Color Mix and Match Puzzle
Color Word Matching Puzzle
Colors: Fun-to-Know Puzzles
Giant Colors and Shapes Train Floor Puzzle

Color Words Poems

When teaching kids about colors, I wanted simple poems that incorporated the spelling of the color words, and examples of colored objects. This way, kids can make a better connection while reading or singing color songs.

Check out my blog post, The Best Color Poems for Kids to see how I use poetry to teach color words.

Brown Bear, Brown Bear What Do You See? Printables

You know it…I am putting Brown Bear, Brown Bear What Do You See? in it’s own category! This is a classic childhood book that incorporates color recognition, color words, animals, and repetition. Any early childhood educator or parent of young kids knows that is a perfect combination to keep learning fun!

Here are a few printable resources you can use after reading the Eric Carle book, Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?.

Making Words: Brown Bear: This set of Brown Bear printables not only has 11 pages of cut & paste worksheets to build the characters from the story, but it also comes with TWO sets of character cards. One with just the character name, and another set with the color words.

Kim J. said: “Super fun for the kiddos!”

Ashley H. said: “My Brown Bear unit is one of my favorite things to do in Kindergarten. This will be a great addition to that!

Building Sentences: Brown Bear – Your kiddos will build color sentences from the book with the cut and paste, print and go, worksheets.

Rachel C. said: “This is great for reinforcing print awareness with a popular/predictable text!

Danon H. said: “My students loved this activity”

Jeannine P. said: “This easy to use, “ready to go” resource is perfect to engage all levels of learners in my classroom! Thank you for providing a fantastic resource from a classic well-loved book!”

When teaching color words, you can have these three printable activities, plus character cards, to use throughout the entire lesson. The Brown Bear, Brown Bear worksheets come bundled to save you time and money. The bundle is available in my Teachers Pay Teachers store, HERE.

Color Picture Books

Here you will find a list of books about colors, and a collection of easy color by number pages for kids.

Color Words Worksheets

To keep your kiddos engaged in learning their colors, simply print out these color words worksheets and color flashcards, and watch how much they will love it! They will read the color word, cut and paste letter tiles to build the word, then write and illustrate a picture. Colors included are red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, brown, black, pink, gray, and white.