My library has a few wooden puzzles and blocks in the children’s area which work great with the COVID situation because I can easily clean them once a week. I had been watching webinars and looking at blogs and pinterest boards for ideas about other activities that I could put out to support early literacy and early numeracy. I got the general idea for tabletop activities from Reading with Red and I took that idea and ran with it.
I knew that my activities needed to be made with materials we already have to keep them free, so for my first ever attempt, I went into our youth services office where we have all of our craft supplies stored and just looked around. I saw materials of a lot of different colors and plain paper plates, and I knew that sorting colors is great for early literacy, so I decided to build an activity based on that.
I chose five of the main colors, wrote the color names on plates with the corresponding-colored marker, cut pieces of pipe cleaner and streamers, added some colored wooden craft sticks, and cut and labeled different shapes in each color for some more word exposure. Finally, I taped the plates to the table so kids couldn’t move them around and used an unlabeled plate to mix all of my objects up.
![](http://earlyliteracylibrarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/table-setup-scaled.jpg)
![](http://earlyliteracylibrarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/other-assorted-items-scaled.jpg)
![](http://earlyliteracylibrarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/shapes-scaled.jpg)
![The completed setup of the color sorting tabletop activity.](http://earlyliteracylibrarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/completed-sorting-scaled.jpg)
How it went
The activity tables we have are not directly in my line of view, but I know since we had just started bringing things out to play with, that they were very popular. Every time I walked back there after kids had been here, all of the objects were sorted into the correct colored plate, so kids were definitely doing this activity. I left it up for two weeks and then put a new activity out, but I am keeping all of the pieces together so that I can use them again in the future because it seemed so popular. I may have to cut out new shapes and laminate them next time because they got a little beat up (I only recently discovered that we have a laminator), but overall, I think this tabletop activity was a success.
Let me know if you use this idea or if you have done anything similar, I’d love to hear! Also, if you have any suggestions for new activities, I am always searching.
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