Ladybug Color Sort

The past two weeks we've been focusing on the four colors Sophie has been exploring so far: red, blue, yellow, and green.  When I stumbled across an adorable ladybug color activity by way of Pinterest, I had to try it out!

A Little Bit of Quiet has a fabulous tutorial of how she made her ladybug color sort game and shares her templates as well!  Her version is absolutely adorable!  (Note: when you click the download link it will have you request permission to view the documents.  She sent me an email quickly to access the documents.  I, however, had waited until the last minute and had been planning on using this activity the next day, so I ended up making my own templates.  Hers are way cuter - just plan ahead a little better than I did and she'll save you some work!)

I decided to put mine together a bit differently, because I didn't have a button maker and my goal was for it to be a flannel board activity, so I modified things slightly.

I printed off my ladybugs on white cardstock and cut them out. Then I laminated the circles, hot glued them onto my felt, and cut around them.  It took me maybe 30 minutes to get my ladybugs all ready to go.  It would have been faster if I'd had a circle punch the right size, but I didn't.

Then I freehanded my leaf pattern (I wanted all four leaves to fit across my flannel board so I went the long skinny route) and cut them out of my flannel.  I think the stitching on the leaves of the original project was what mostly sold me on the adorableness of this activity!  I enjoyed getting to pull my sewing machine out and do some really simple freehand stitches to embellish my leaves.  I know that Sophie totally won't care, but it made me really happy.  Lol.

This was my first project for Sophie's flannel board and I have learned (at least) one thing the hard way.  The 5 mil lamination I had at the time is too heavy for the felt to hold for toddler play.  I don't know if the 3 mil would do better, but I'm hoping so.  I'll let you know the next time I try it!  So this has ended up being a floor game as opposed to a board game. Oh well.

Sophie seems to enjoy it, even though the matching is still a bit advanced for her independently.  She really likes playing with the ladybugs and we'll be able to use this to review our colors for a long time! As A Little Bit of Quiet shares as well, they would be great for counting, simple addition and subtraction, and imaginative play down the road.

I started another flannel board project this week which I will share on the blog soon!