As a homeschool graduate currently homeschooling my own munchkins, I’m always looking for creative and inexpensive educational activities. I absolutely love dollar stores of all kinds for bargain educational supplies to use! They cost so little, and can cover so many different topics. One of my nifty finds has been these color sorting cubes. Being creative with them, I can come up with bunches of different ways to use these little boogers to keep my little smarty pants entertained and educated at the same time. I’ve used them for lots of different things, but I thought that I would share some of what we have done with them as fun & stimulating preschool projects.

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You can order these from Amazon if you want to: Learning Resources Hands-On Soft Color Cubes (Set of 102)

We started off the day simply. Since I’m a penny pincher from way back, I took two styrofoam plates we had used for our lunch, wiped them off, grabbed some colored markers, outlined and filled in half of each plate in the four different colors of her sorting cubes. I then asked her to put all of the cubes on the matching color section. As you can see, she did great. 🙂 She did this a few times before she was ready to move on to something else, so then I came up with a couple of more fun educational games for her…

I flipped the two styrofoam plates over, and drew out the new projects with my trusty markers again. What, you thought mrs frugal was gonna use new plates? LOL On the left in this photo, I told her to follow the color pattern using two blocks in each rectangle. On the right, I asked her what each number and color was, then requested that she put the correct number and color of blocks in each rectangle. She really enjoyed this one, since it was a little more challenging. After a little while, she was ready to do something new with her color cubes, so Mommy had to come up with another challenge…

For her last color cube project of the day, I asked her to put 4 blue cubes on the blue side, 5 green cubes on the green side, 6 orange cubes on the orange and 7 red cubes on the red. We did this same “game” with several different series of numbers. She really enjoyed the challenge of remembering how many went on which color, since it wasn’t written down.

Now that I’ve shared a few of the educational games we do with our color cubes, what are some inexpensive items you use to help kiddos learn? What do you wish you could find an educational use for?

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