Nibbles Colors: Reading and Math Printable

Here is a fun and easy pair of reading and math printable activities you can do in conjunction (or not!) with the book Nibbles Colors by Emma Yarlett. Keep reading for the link to download the activities!

I’ve been working with a first grader and her pre-k brother. These kiddos are so special and clearly love learning, and my heart goes out to them during this covid crisis. They’re doing all virtual school but definitely missing the in person experience. While I haven’t been in the classroom for a few years, I know how much can be gained from being able to work with a teacher in person, especially at such a young age. I’m so fortunate to be able to have a chance to work with them for a few times a week to help bridge a bit of that gap. 

Since I work with them both at the same time, I’ve been doing my best to do fun activities to meet both their very different needs simultaneously. I’m also trying to keep our time together fun and similar to the learning experiences they’d get at school, but hard to recreate at home. So far, I’m finding that it helps to have an activity, such as a read-aloud, to do together at the beginning, and then differentiated lessons based on that first activity. That lets me check in with both of them at first, and then be able to give some individual attention to both students afterwards. 

This lesson was based on the book Nibbles Colors by Emma Yarlett. It’s a cute little story about a book-eating monster who is trying bites of color on each page. At the end, he has nibbled a rainbow.

For the first grader, we focused on recognizing some sight words. These are words that appear often in text, but don’t follow the rules of spelling. Words like the, of, you, who, do, etc. For our activity, I made a blank rainbow with a different sight word from the book in each section. After we read it together the first time, I let her take the lead reading it again, with my help on the tricky words. When she found a word that was on the rainbow, she got to color that section of the rainbow in.

For the preschooler, I made different color clouds, each with a different number, 1-10. His job was to place the proper amount of sticker dots of that color inside the cloud. This was a numbers activity that helped him work on counting and recognizing the symbols for each number. Since he was practicing counting the dots just once (no repeats) we also wrote the numbers on each dot once he counted it.

These activities took about 30 minutes to complete. Here are the links to download the counting activity and the rainbow. They shouldn’t need much prep at all! If you’re looking for a copy of Nibbles Colors, check out my Usborne Books store – just search “nibbles” or “nibbles colors” in the search bar. I sell these books because my family loves them and it was a matter of time before I couldn’t resist trying to share them with everyone else!

PS – If you’re looking for more reading activities, check out my post about Chicka Chicka Boom Boom!