Taking characters like the Teenage Ninja Turtles that kids are excited about and using them in educational games peaks children’s interest in the skills covered in the game. This educational game invites children to sort through a bowl of treasures and match them to each turtle’s mask. Each of the treasures in this game are intentionally small. Children will have use their pincher grip to pick them up. This will allow this educational game to work on more than one skill. Fine motor skills and color matching united to create a fun color sorting turtle game.
Educational Games Supplies
To make the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles you will need:
Purple construction paper
Orange construction paper
Red construction paper
Blue construction paper
Black construction paper
White construction paper
Dark green construction paper
How to create the turtles:
I created each aspect of the turtles by layering construction paper so, I could cut four turtle parts out at a time. The turtle’s heads were all cut out at the same time by layering four pieces of dark green construction paper. The top of the head is a smaller semicircle than the bottom section of the head. The white and black sections of the eyes were created by folding two narrow strips of white paper and two narrow pieces of black paper into fourths before cutting out small circles. The black pupils were cut out first and the white sections were cut out second. The second set of black narrow strips were folded in half and cut into smiles.
For the masks a piece of blue, red, purple, and orange paper were stacked to together. The turtle’s head was traced onto the top piece of construction paper. A mask was drawn onto the face outline and then all the layers were cut out.
When all the pieces had been cut out for the turtle’s heads, they were glued onto the head. I decided that the masks needed to have little end pieces on the left hand side. Those pieces were cut out of some of the scraps leftover from cutting out the masks.
Playing This Educational Game
A bunch of treasures were searched for and found in our craft closet. I found buttons, stickers, and pom poms. I sorted through the treasures and took out all the red, blue, orange and purple colored ones. These treasures were placed into a black snack bowl.
With all the game elements in place I asked my son to sort the treasures out by color and put them on the turtle what was wearing that color. If you have young child, that may take some time. Some older children may easily be able to see how the treasures should be sorted, but may have trouble using their fingers to pick up the objects.
To add a reading element to the game I wrote out the color words on white paper. I made it a easy by writing each color word out with a magic marker of that color. To make it a little more challenging I could have written the color words out with a black marker. I asked my son to place the correct color word under the turtle wearing that color of a mask.
More Educational Game Ideas
If you are looking for more educational games and activities that work on learning colors, you may want to check out my Learning About Colors board on Pinterest.
Follow JDaniel4’s Mom’s board Learning about Colors on Pinterest.
noelle d says
Using Ninja Turtles – AWESOME!
Way to get their attention 🙂
Rosey says
This is perfect timing for us. The old TMNT is on at the movies (summer dollar shows). We could makes these to get geared up for it.