Umbrella Counting & Color Sort – What a brilliant STEM idea for your toddler/preschooler to celebrate Umbrella Day. This simple activity promotes fine-motor skills and color recognition! 

We love simple activities that build skills! The Umbrella Counting & Color Sort activity is perfect for small groups or independent work. Use it as a Letter U craft for toddlers and preschoolers. Great rainy day craft, or for a preschool weather unit or theme. Plus its perfec for Umbrella Day that’s on 10th of Feb this year.

Umbrella Counting & Color Sort

Supplies needed:

• Colored papers (different colors)
• Scissors
• Foam numbers
• Pipeclear bits
• Cello tape
• Buttons
• An empty round box

To Make:

Layer all the colored sheets on top of each other. Now using a pencil & the lid of a box, trace a circle in the center

I did a free hand drawing of the umbrella shape and cut them out. Don’t they already look pretty?

Next, cut the matching pipeclears in matching colors into 4 inch strips.

Bend them at the bottom to form a J shape handle for the umbrellas

Secure them to the back of the umbrella using clear tape. 

Now that our umbrellas are ready, we need to decide which umbrellas will hold which number. My daughter loved choosing the numbers herself.

We used readymade Foam stickers with a sticky backing and stuch a different number onto different umbrellas. You could alternately draw your numbers with a blackmarker.

That’s it. Collect lots of colorful buttons and then get your preschooler to sort the buttons by color first and then by numbers. Since buttons are a choking harard, please ensure that Adult supervision is present at all times. If you don’t like using buttons, you could us large pom poms or even toy cars.

I love that this is so simple to pull out and use again. It takes me about two minutes to lay the umbrella’s ut and gather the buttons.

28 DAYS OF HANDS-ON STEM

This post is a part of an amazing series of hands-on STEM activities for kids. I’ve joined up with 28 other bloggers and we’re creating 60+ fun science, technology, engineering & math activities. Each week is a different topic: STEM Goes Green, STEM Challenges, Coding for Kids & STEM On the Cheap.  Click here for the full list of activities.