This color matching task with clothespins is a versatile task that can be made easier or harder depending on your students’ skills. In this post I’ll show you ways to set it up and how to start it for beginning matchers and build it up to reading color words. It’s also a great way to get some fine motor practice into students’ day as well as practice matching skills.
Color Matching Task With Clothespins: Material List
- Clothespins You can use colored clothespins (wood or plastic). Or grab wooden clothespins and color them with permanent markers as I show in the video.
- Squares of construction paper to match colors
- Pictures of colored items (see video for ideas)
- Permanent marker
Color Matching Task: Who Is It For?
Typically I would use this with younger students who are working on color matching. However, you could use pictures of common items that older students need to match colors (e.g. socks) for older students. But, for older students I typically will opt for more functional matching materials or functional representations.
Color Matching Task With Clothespins Video Tutorial
Tips for Making the Color Matching Task With Clothespins
In the video I talk about how to move from the basic color matching task with solid colors up to matching color words to colors. Start with matching solid color squares or rectangles to clothespins. Then, move to pictures where there is one dominant color across the full card, like the tall photo at the top of this post. Next, you can move to singular pictures that are primarily one color like the butterfly on the left above. Then, write the color words in the same color and match like the one on the right above. Finally, you can start to shift to using black print. If the student struggles with the shift, start to fade the text from the identified color (e.g., green) to black one letter at a time. Not all students will need it that small a step, but if they do that can help.
Need more ideas for task boxes? Check out the resources below.
More Workbasket Wednesday Resources
Looking for more ideas on special education work boxes or work systems and how they can be used? Check out the links in Resources below for more posts. And, I wrote about a book about them!
Buy From Amazon (including Kindle) (see my disclosure policy for more information about affiliate links).
GET ALL THE VISUALS AND ORGANIZATIONAL TOOLS YOU NEED to start independent work in your classroom.
These kits include an e-book with directions on setting up independent work systems and using the materials included, data sheets for tracking progress, visuals for the special education work boxes and schedules, what’s next visuals, and mastery sheets to keep track of which students have mastered which task.
![Independent Work-3 Ways It can Become Your Best Classroom Management Tool [A sorting task in a shoebox to sort nouns from verbs on popsicle sticks into plastic cups]](https://autismclassroomresources.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/BLOG-22208-3-Ways-Task-Boxes-and-IW-Help-Classroom-Management-2-768x644.jpg)
