At ED Specially 4U classes we are often asked for ideas on how parents can assist their children to learn at home. A fundamental educational skill for your child is the identification of colour.
Colour activities are very important for your pre-schooler. Colour recognition assists children to understand the world around them. Colour identification provides your child both vocabulary to explain and understand, as well as enhances visual discrimination skills. Colour knowledge is important for both literacy and numeracy.
Colours: All colours can be introduced to your pre-schooler– not only primary colours red, blue, green and yellow, but also the colours of the spectrum and variance in shade such as light/dark colours.
As with all learning at ED Specially 4U, we encourage you to expose your child to as many hands-on learning activities as possible. Children learn through exploration and FUN rather than only rote learning. We encourage the use of colour wall displays as a way to first instruct your child in the language of colours. The wall displays can be used to teach the names of the colours, and then to match objects of the same colour. This is a great starting point for children to see that there are many different colours and they can take the time to discriminate between them without object or picture distractors.
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| Balloon Colour Charts |
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| Star Colour Charts |
You are able to introduce all of the colours for the purpose of giving colours context. It is then great to choose one or two colours to focus on for each activity. In the beginning, children are learning their new vocabulary. While they can quickly match colours to the same colour, it takes longer to name the colours and longer again for them to independently use the colour names in their environment.
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| Building visual discrimination skills to be able to match colours |
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| Correctly matching coloured objects |
Colours can be taught through every day activities; discussing fruits and vegetables, looking at pictures in books and naming objects in the environment.
Craft activities are a great way to allow your child to work with colours in hands-on learning.
Paint play, is the perfect opportunity to explore colours as you can name the colours and discuss things that are each of the colours. Don't limit your child's artwork to the colours that each object is traditionally seen as for example: a tree can be green, red, yellow, not limited to standard green.
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| Bubble Wrap painting is a fun way to see colours |
Colours can be used in isolation by setting up paint stations with only certain colours. Discuss the colours, try to mix the colours and use the colours as adjectives.
Children love the tactile activity of shaving cream with food dye! They get to explore the feeling of the shaving cream while reinforcing the colour that they are focussing on.
We love to make a milk and food dye rainbow at our classes, it is a lovely chance to discuss the individual colours and to then watch them mix together in a rainbow of colour.
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| Rainbow Colour Bowl |
Playdough colours are another fun way to learn about colours. Homemade playdough allows the opportunity to create different colours as well as applying textures such as coloured glitter or other objects (such as coloured rice) that can be added.
Play activities naturally lend themselves to colour discussion and naming. Children's games and toys are made to be colourful and are a fantastic way to build on your childs' language skills.
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| Colour Sorting Games are great for colour recognition |
Visual Discrimination games where your child has the opportunity to recognise the printed colour and match this with the colour on an object is another important way to extend your child's colour recognition/labelling skills.
Playing with a parachute allows the opportunity to select colours and play games recognising the colours - ie. sit on the yellow, jump on the blue colour.
Colour learning and vocabulary development can also taught in conjunction with activities to develop your child's fine motor skills. Many games use colour stacking and matching which encourages fine motor development. Tongs can be used to pick up small objects and match them to the same colour, or you can use scissors to snip/cut coloured paper, and create collages or structured pictures.
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| Fine Motor Tong Colour Activities |
Threading activities can also use colours as the basis - you can choose to thread a specific colour or you can further develop your child's mathematical skills by following patterns. Colour identification is essential for pattern making. Patterns are part of everyday life as well as a strong mathematical concept, and therefore offer a fantastic extension to your child's colour learning.
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| Colour Threading FuN |
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| Teddy Threading |
ED Specially 4U offers colour games/activities that can be incorporated into your Learn at Home FUN:
ED's Colour Match Game allows your child to match to one/two colours or all of the colours in the game. Our cute ED dog motivates the children to correctly match each card to the coloured baseboard.
Primary Shape Colour Match develops your child's colour vocabulary by matching colours with shapes. Discrimination between colours and shapes can extend your child's vocabulary as they label the qualities in the game.
As part of our mult-sensory learning strategies, we also incorporate songs into our teaching. This can be reinforced at home also. We offer the 'Sing a rainbow' singing resource
When your child is competent at identifying the colours of the rainbow make sure you encourage the use of colours as part of your child’s vocabulary. Extend their language skills by using colours as descriptive words.
Visit our website to see the colour resources at our shop:
www.edspecially4u.com.au
Visit our pinterest page to see the activities that we think are great for: Colour Learn at Home
https://www.pinterest.com/edspecially4u/colour-resources/
Like us on Facebook to keep up with our fantastic learning activities:
https://business.facebook.com/EDSpecially4U?business_id=799799390090909
Follow us on instragram:
https://instagram.com/edspecially4u/
Finally don't forget:
BOOKS BOOKS BOOKS - you can share books about colours with your child which will allow them opportunity to name objects of the different colours. You can extend your child's vocabulary by naming coloured objects and also by finding colours in the stories. Colour naming and object naming/recognition are extremely important for developing your child's vocabulary, as well as further understanding the world around them. Also recognise the importance of your child discriminating between the graphics and real life objects, this is a very important pre-reading skill.
Learning about colours is FUN!!!
For the Love of Learning
Donna
ED Specially 4U
