How To Teach Super Simple Songs

How To Teach Pink Purple Orange Brown

Caitie is sharing tips for using the preschool song “Pink Purple Orange Brown” in the classroom and at home for lots of fun learning with little ones. She has lots of great ideas! And she’ll lead us through the song using gestures – an excellent way to introduce a song to children. “Pink Purple Orange Brown” is a fun simple song that is perfect for teaching and reviewing colors.


Try these ideas in the classroom or at home!

  • We love to use gestures while we sing to reinforce vocabulary, but for this song, it’s best to use flashcards or real-life items to represent each color.
  • Have a color hunt with your students! Sing the song and point each student to assign them a color. Then have them search through the room looking for items that are that color! Once the items are found, sing the song and encourage your students to hold up the items they found that represent each color.
  • You can also have each student find all the colors from the song for a fun scavenger hunt.
  • For a different version of a color hunt, try placing four sheets of paper on the ground to represent each color: pink, purple, orange, and brown. Have your students find items around the room that are each color and bring them back to place on the correct piece of paper. If you’d rather not have your students searching through the room, try putting together a basket of colorful items and encourage them to sort the items onto the different colored papers. We talk more about fun color hunts in this article.
  • This song uses food items to represent the colors pink, purple, orange, and brown so it pairs well with the song My Yellow Car! Another great song about colorful foods!
  • Give your students coloring tools that are pink, purple, orange, and brown and have them draw and color the colorful items from the song! See if they can think of any other things that are those colors to draw, too!
  • For a fun no-mess sensory activity, try making our Colors In A Bag, using the colors pink, purple, orange, and brown. This is a great activity for younger learners who are starting to identify colors. They can touch the squishy colors without getting messy and you can sing the song and point to the colors as you play.
  • Try using color flashcards as you sing! You can point to the flashcards or use them as visual indicators as you teach the colors in the song. Caitie uses these flashcards in the video: I See Something Blue Flashcards & I See Something Pink Flashcards.
  • Try our color-by-numbers worksheet for a fun coloring challenge using the colors pink, purple, orange, and brown.

More resources for this song (1)