Montessori-Inspired Color Games {Free Printables}

I’m so excited to have received the new Spielgaben version 4! Today, I’m sharing some fun Montessori-inspired color games I prepared for preschoolers using some of the new Spielgaben educational toys along with free printables I found online.

This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of Spielgaben. All opinions are honest and my own. This post also contains affiliate links (at no cost to you).

In case you’re not familiar with Spielgaben toys, they are exceptionally high-quality educational toys designed for ages 3-12. You can see from the photo that the cabinet is very high quality and fits in well in a room with traditional Montessori materials. I love the new, easily removable drawers in version 4. The yarn balls from the 1st Spielgaben set can be used with babies and toddlers, too.

The Spielgaben complete set comes with over 700 pages of full-color printed learning materials. These printed materials help you as a parent or teacher easily use Spielgaben toys educationally with your child and/or students.

Spielgaben Materials Used in This Post

For this post, I used the Spielgaben sticks and colored vertex balls from set 8 of version 4. The sticks and vertex balls can be used for a variety of activities from design work to advanced math activities. I’m using them for color games for preschoolers in this post. Almost any of the materials could be used for the color games, though. For older children, you could use the games to demonstrate probability.

In this post, I’ll link to free printables which will help make the activities simple to prepare yet attractive. I’ll also tell you where I found the materials for my activities.

Note: If you’d like the wooden sticks from the earlier Spielgaben versions, Spielgaben will sell them to you at minimal cost to go along with version 4.

Color Ball Matching for Toddlers

This activity didn’t use a free printable. It’s simply a way you can include babies and young toddlers in your Spielgaben activities using the vertex balls. My 13-month-old granddaughter, Zoey, has always loved the Spielgaben yarn balls and was instantly drawn to the vertex balls. Because she still mouths objects (even though it’s not as often as when she was a baby), the vertex balls wouldn’t be safe for her.

I placed two of each color of vertex ball in a Really Useful .55 Liter Box. You’ll need to seal the box using a professional high temperature glue gun or white duct tape or electrical tape. You could show a toddler how to roll the balls around in the box and then look for matching colored balls that land together.

Color Matching Game/Scavenger Hunt

This activity uses an ordinary dice along with the free printable colors minibook circles from Preschool Mom. I cut out the smallest circles from the printable. I had a dice with rounded corners and a circle in the middle with the dots, so I was able to cut out and glue on the six colored circles to fit. With regular cube-shaped dice, I would cut out a square around each colored circle to cover the dots on the dice.

Note: For any of these activities, you could simply use the drawer from the cabinet to store the materials. I’ve shown the activities on trays in case you prefer that.

I used pre-cut pieces of craft foam, so this was very easy to prepare. The craft foam could be used with the color dice. It could also be used for a color scavenger hunt, where the child goes to the Spielgaben cabinet to choose materials in the color that was rolled. It really could be used for any color scavenger hunt around the home or classroom.

Roll a Color Game and Fine-Motor Activity

For this tray, I used a small potato basket and toast tong from Montessori Services. The tray is one of the Multicraft 5-piece trays. I used the same colored dice from the first game. I used a 10 well plastic palette for the children to place the colored balls as each color is rolled. Children could play until all 10 wells in the palette are filled. You could place the dice in the center of the palette if you wish.

Color Spinner and Building Game

This activity uses a small dice and the free printable spinner from Educational Technology Center (probability spinner 6) with colors minibook circles from Preschool Mom or the color spinner from Preschool Mom (using a paper clip and brad for the spinner). I used a large plastic tray from Montessori Services, which is a perfect size for many activities.

Spielgaben version 4 comes with two playboards. I used the dual-sided playboard to illustrate a geometric shape that could be created after enough blue pieces were rolled. Children could create any design they wished with the color that had been selected with the spinner. If you have an earlier version of Spielgaben, you could use the wooden sticks with playdough instead of the vertex balls as connectors.

UPDATE:

Special deal for my readers!

All My Spielgaben Posts

Many of these include links to free printables! (Click on an image to go to the related blog post. The gallery is ordered according to publication date with my latest post at the top.)

Version 4 of Spielgaben Educational Toys 

I highly recommend Spielgaben as an amazing educational material for home or school. Even though the toys aren’t inexpensive, they’re definitely worth the price because of the high quality of materials and number of years your children or students can use them.

Special deal for my readers!