🎓 Skills Your Child Will Develop
- 🎨 Creativity & Self-Expression — Making freely chosen creative decisions — which colors, shapes, and materials to use — develops a child's personal artistic voice and the confidence to express original ideas across all areas of life.
- 💬 Vocabulary Expansion — Craft activities introduce rich domain-specific vocabulary: fold, crease, overlap, layer, press, symmetrical, transparent. Children who acquire craft vocabulary develop stronger descriptive language across all contexts.
- 📋 Planning & Sequencing — Multi-step craft projects require children to think about what comes first, next, and last — building the procedural sequencing skills that underlie reading comprehension, mathematics, and everyday problem solving.
- 📐 Spatial Reasoning — Three-dimensional crafts — paper folding, cardboard construction, clay sculpting — develop the spatial intelligence children need for geometry, engineering, and understanding how physical objects relate in space.
Written by Stella Blackstone
Illustrated by Caroline Mockford
From the Book
“Here is a bicycle, shiny and red./Here is a flower with round yellow head.”
About the Book
Cleo’s Color Book is about a cute little orange cat who goes out to explore the colors of her world. She starts by looking at a blank easel with a quizzical look as if she wonders what should go on the paper. Then she wanders outside to see what she can discove. Along the way she finds many colorful objects such as a red bicycle and pink ice cream. During her adventure she is often in the company of a little boy who seems to be her own. At the end of the story she is looking at the white moon as she sits on a windowsill with the little boy sleeping in the bed below the window. The last two pages are a cleverly drawn chart showing how to mix colors to create new ones.
From the Reviewer
Cleo’s Color Book is written with the pages rhyming in pairs. With only one short sentence on each page, the book is sure to hold the attention of preschoolers. All of the colorful objects in the book are items that are familiar to most preschool children so they will easily relate to the story.
The most significant thing about the book, however, is the illustrations. They are boldly drawn in bright colors, as many preschool books are, but the artist also draws in a style that creates a depth of texture. The book actually looks as though a child might have painted the pictures with tempera paint, yet the pictures are so detailed that they tell the story beyond what is said with words.
Charming Character Portrayal
Preschoolers will be fascinated by Cleo's personality. Her little cat face is very expressive. She smiles lovingly at the boy who owns her. Her look is questioning when he’s holding a watering can, as if she is afraid he might accidentally get her wet. She arches her back angrily when a black kitten walks on her garden wall. Cleo is a cat with cattitude.
A Good Choice for a Classroom Book
The vivid and artistic pictures in Cleo's Color Book give this preschool book an educational value beyond just teaching colors and color mixing. The method used to create the illustrations exposes children to technique. The large, bright pictures, along with the short sentences on each page, make this a great book for classroom read aloud time. The children will be able to see the pictures clearly and they will be eager to hear the next rhyme. The book is equally enticing for use at free reading time, so much so you may feel your classroom needs more than one copy.
Book Details
Title: Cleo’s Color Book
Reading level: Baby-Preschool
Hardcover: 32 pages
Publisher: Barefoot Books ($1)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1905236301
Cleo's Color Book Craft
Enhance the educational power of Cleo's Color Book through crafts. Crafts help children reinforce what they have learned by acting it out physically. They also encourage your preschooler's creativity and boost their self-esteem.
Preschool Color Book
Your preschooler can make their own color book to help them learn and remember colors. It's as simple as gathering pictures of different colored items and placing them in a photo album. Your preschooler may choose to draw pictures instead of cutting them out. Whatever method they choose, it's a sure way to spend quality time together.
Preschool Color Palette
Cleo asks young readers to mix their own colors and show them to her. Preschool Color Palette lets your preschooler create their own world of color.
My name is
Shannon McMath and I am the Crafts writer at PreschoolRock.com. I live in California with my husband, Steve, and my daughter, Emily. Crafting is a passion of mine and I love to pass on the joy to preschoolers. Sharing quality time with your preschooler creating crafts will not only help him/her develop fine motor skills and creativity, it will create memories that will last a life time! If you have any ideas, suggestions or comments feel free to
contact me. Thanks!
Establish a rotating gallery system: a designated wall space with clips, a clothesline, or frames with removable backs where new work regularly replaces old. Photograph all work before rotating it out — a digital photo album of a year's artwork shows remarkable development and stores without physical space. Send particularly meaningful work to grandparents and relatives, who often display it prominently. The key principle: everything gets acknowledged and displayed briefly; the best pieces are kept for longer; photographs preserve everything.
