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Let's Learn Our Colors!
Tips and Ideas to Help Toddlers and Preschoolers with Color Recognition
By Alexandria Powell
In a their second year of life – 12 to 24 months – your child will begin to compare characteristics between objects, leading to the ability to match. Children will be able to match items they are familiar with (for example, a pair of shoes), before they can isolate one characteristic such as color, Hunt O'Brien says. As children hear color words used to label items in their world, they will be ready to point to an object that is of a certain color, such as when a parent asks, "Hand me the red sock."
"Depending on the level of expressive language a child has, she may begin sorting objects before she labels items by color," Hunt O'Brien says. "But many 2-year-olds have enough language to put words together to create describing phrases such as 'my red ball.'"
By the time your toddler becomes a preschooler, or from about 3 to 5 years of age, she's ready to experiment with color. "[Children this age are] beginning to understand that there are shades of colors, and that two colors can be mixed to form another," Hunt O'Brien says.
Jacquie McTaggart, author of From the Teacher's Desk (Booklocker, 2003), taught a color unit to first graders for 42 years. "We always worked on one color for a solid week, reading books with the color word in the title, cooking foods in the 'color of the week,' and doing art projects to correlate with the color," McTaggart says. "For example, wile working on the color brown, we read Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?
