Clipping mask exercise.

I am almost finished with this exercise. First I started with the bottom two words, both of which were not too difficult, having used a clipping mask before. I first placed/created the image and gradient; then added the type. After adding the type, I made both the outline and fill of the letters blank, then selected both the type layer and background image/gradient and went to object>clipping mask>make.
The top exercise was the trickiest, as advertised...I struggled with drawing lines, then creating boxes that I filled with the various colors until I figured out that there is a tool to create a grid. It's grouped under the line tool and looks like a grid. Using the grid tool, I created the grid then used Live Paint to fill in the various boxes with their appropriate colors. After doing that I created the two text boxes with 'Kids' and 'Play' and then joined the two boxes using the Pathfinder tool. Doing that enabled me to use both as a clipping mask, so that when I selected those boxes and the grid and created my clipping mask, both words were used as the mask.