Guide for grown-ups
Teaching colours to toddlers
Colour is one of the first abstract ideas a child handles. A red ball and a red bus have nothing physically in common except a property with a name — which is a surprisingly big idea for someone who has been talking for a year.
Matching comes before naming
Long before a child can say "blue", they can put the blue brick with the other blue bricks. Sorting is the foundation, and it needs no vocabulary at all.
Tip a box of mixed bricks out and make two piles. Do not ask what colour they are — just say "these ones go together" and let them join in. Naming can arrive weeks later.
Teach one colour at a time
Introducing six colours at once produces a child who says "blue" for everything. Pick one, live with it for a week, and point it out everywhere: a red jumper, a red car, a red apple.
The variety is the point. Seeing red on ten different objects is what separates the property from the object.
Say the colour after the noun
"Pass me the ball, the red one" works better than "pass me the red ball". Putting the colour word at the end gives it emphasis and stops it being swallowed in the middle of the sentence.
This is a small trick from speech and language therapy and it makes a noticeable difference.
Animals make good colour anchors
A pink pig, a black and white cow, a grey elephant, a green crocodile. Animals give each colour a memorable home, and children are already motivated to talk about them.
It is also why colour books built around animals tend to hold attention better than books of abstract shapes — the child is there for the crocodile and picks up the green on the way.
Do not worry about the ones that come last
Red, blue, yellow and green usually arrive first. Orange, purple, pink and brown follow. Grey gets confused with brown for ages, and that is fine.
If a child over about five still cannot reliably match colours — as opposed to name them — it is worth mentioning to your GP, as colour vision deficiency affects roughly one in twelve boys.
