Read and Color: Read the Sentence, Color the Right Fruits

This 1st grade read-and-color worksheet gives the child six cards, each with one short sentence and a strip of black-and-white fruits under it. A sentence might say Color 4 watermelons purple or Find 3 strawberries and color them yellow, and the strip below holds exactly that many of the named fruit plus one or two pictures of another fruit that the sentence never mentions. A color key runs across the top with a swatch beside each of its six color words. The child reads the sentence, picks out the fruits it names, counts to the number, and colors exactly those and no others.

This is reading with a consequence. A child cannot color the right fruits without decoding the fruit's name, the number, and the color word and holding all three in mind at once, and the extra fruit on every strip makes skimming fail. That is the difference between this page and a color-by-number sheet: here the code is a sentence, and the sentence has to be understood, not just matched. The teacher can check comprehension from across the room - a colored pineapple on the strawberry strip or two colored lemons where the sentence asks for four tells the story immediately - and the color key lets a child who reads the sentence but is unsure of a color word find it independently.

Print the PDF free on plain paper so crayons and markers both work. The easier version uses four cards, four colors, bigger pictures, counts of two or three and one extra picture per strip; the harder version keeps six cards and six colors, which may include brown or pink, raises the counts to three, four or five and puts two or three extra pictures of two other kinds on every strip. When the child reads these sentences fluently, the unscramble the sentence page asks for sentences to be built rather than followed, and the write the word page moves the fruits and animals from reading into spelling.