Fun Preschool Color Sorting Bear Activity for the Light Table

Last Updated on December 27, 2021 by Sheryl Cooper

Inside: Invite your preschoolers to have fun with a color sorting bear activity on your light table! A hands-on way to teach color recognition while also strengthening fine motor skills. 

I will never forget the first time I saw a light table in a classroom.

I was blown away!

I knew I just had to have one, but it took a few years until we had enough fundraising money to purchase one for our classroom. (I’ve since learned you can make your own. Wish I knew that then!)

During our hibernation theme, we found a way to extend bears and caves so that we could work on identifying colors.

I felt the light table would be a fun place since the colors would show off nicely. However, if you don’t have a light table, you can easily set this up at a regular table.

Fun Preschool Color Sorting Bear Activity for the Light Table

What we used:

Counting bears

Colored masking tape (red, green, yellow, blue)

Paper bowls

Tempera paint (red, green, yellow, blue)

Assembling the caves:

Cut an opening in each paper bowl with scissors.

Paint each bowl so that you have 1 of each color: red, green, yellow, blue.

Setting up the activity:

Place the colored caves on the light table, with a strip of coordinating masking tape in front.

Add the bears.

At first, the children were having fun lining the bears up on the matching colored masking tape.

I think I even heard some counting going on!

And then they decided to see how many bears could fit under the cave.

To their delight, a lot!

They then removed the bears from the cave and started all over again.

And then, quite by surprise, a red bunny rabbit ended up in the crowd of bears. They found this hilarious and I didn’t let on that I had no idea how that bunny got in there. But knowing how busy our preschool storage closet gets, I’m sure he was accidentally returned with the wrong group.

But it turned out to be a happy mistake, and the bunny got along quite nicely with all those bears.

Books to go with this activity:

If you love light tables as much as we do, check out this amazing collection of ideas:

Fun Light Table Activities