Preschool Paint Chip Outdoor Color Scavenger Hunt

Learning colors is an important milestone in any child’s life. Some kids learn them while they are practically still in their cribs, while others, like my preschooler, take a little longer to learn their colors. This paint chip color scavenger hunt is a fun way to teach kids of almost any age their colors. After this activity, my preschooler was able to correctly identify all the colors of the rainbow. As a bonus, it gets kids moving outdoors, too!

This activity is just about the simplest you can imagine, but my preschooler LOVED it. She spent almost an hour with me hunting for colors outside. Any toddlers and preschoolers still learning their colors will have a lot of fun with this simple outdoor activity. As a bonus, it encourages kids to spend more time in nature and take the time to notice the world around them.

Cut apart the colors before starting. I gave the entire rainbow to my preschooler. One set of colors per child doing this activity will help prevent any fighting over who gets to hold the paint chips.

Give a card to your preschooler, then have them hunt for plants that match that color.

Green was easy to find.

We also found red, yellow, and orange pretty quickly.

But the hard one to find was blue. We could not find any blue things in nature as hard as we tried. There were no blue flowers in our yard at the time, and we couldn’t see much else blue outside either (other than the sky), but finally, after much hunting, we found an old blue eraser half-buried under a flower bed.

It was so much fun to see how excited my preschooler was when she finally had collected specimens for the entire rainbow.