I don’t even know where to start!
I’ve heard this phrase far too often. How could I not do a post to explain how I started teaching Grady at home? It’s really not hard…yet I say that because I’m an educator and have had experience in the classroom. This post is for the parents that DON’T have an education background and maybe want to start helping their child at home.
Start with a Focus Color
MY child learned all his colors at once. He SO SMART!
Well, good for you, Janet. Grady wasn’t able to learn his colors all at once. If you’re like me and don’t have a child prodigy on your hands, focusing on one color at a time is essential to prevent confusion. My goal was to just focus on one color a week. Usually I like to pick colors that match the season. That way if we’re out and about and see the colors, we can talk about it. I started with red in September and then we would come back to red in December.
I took toys and puzzles with our focus color and threw them in a bin. I would sit and play with him for a few minutes giving him some instructions (for example: Can you find the green duck? What should we feed the green duck?) Eventually I would leave him to play.
We went through every color. We played and I gave him simple instructions.
Incorporate Your Focus Color with Play
One of the big things with Grady is repeat, repeat, repeat. After introducing his color bin, I would usually try to “play” with that same color. I would bring out anything from playdough, colored ice, oobleck, colored rice, stickers, etc.
After learning the color from our color bin, I would usually repeat the color over and over. Let’s play with some ORANGE play dough! Should we make some ORANGE pumpkins? How about mommy makes you some GREEN oobleck? Here’s some GREEN obleck to play with!
Can you put the GREEN stickers inside the circle?
Can you make some RED apples for the tree?
Start Adding Known Colors with Unknown Colors
Once we got the color red under our belt, I started with green. Made the sensory bin, played with the color green and then added it to red. As I said before, I can’t just throw it all at Grady all at once. A little bit at a time. Once I knew he understood that this was red and this was green, I could then put the two colors together for him to sort.
As he learned more and more colors, I was able to add another color and then another. But I always made sure there was at least ONE color he was familiar with.
Eventually, I was able to add all kinds of color sorts with a variety of toys and materials.
Practice, Practice, Practice!
Now that Grady is well versed in his colors, it’s time to practice and practice in a variety of ways. Sorting by color is an essential early math skill. Toddlers learn to look at items by certain attributes and classify them into groups. We always start with color, because it’s an obvious attribute and then move onto more complex ones such as shape, size, texture, type, and so on.
Hopefully this helps you get started with teaching your toddler colors at home! It’s not that hard – it just takes time and patience and repeat, repeat, repeat!
~Ashley