Preschool Color Activities
Did you know that one sign of reading readiness is that a child knows how to identify his/her colors? In many ways, it is quite difficult to teach a child colors. The child either can recognize the difference in colors, or they don’t see any difference. Until the child’s brain is ready to see the differences, you cannot really get him to understand. One day it just clicks and the child can see colors. I wanted to write a post that has a few preschool color activities to help you teach your child colors!
The same is true for many other signs of reading readiness. You can teach the child a million times “this is the letter a”…but until the child is ready, the child will likely continually act confused/answer the wrong answer about “what letter is this?” One day it just clicks!
That being said, it is still good to continually find natural times to point out the colors, the letters and eventually the letter sounds. At first you just want to focus on one color or one letter. When the child understands that color or letter, then they will be more inclined to understand different colors and letters. A good color to start with is orange. Oranges are orange. Keep pointing this out. Pumpkins are orange too. Point out other things that are orange. Eventually your little one will understand -oranges are orange and other things are orange too!
My little two year old is just starting to get his colors. I have pointed out colors a bunch in the past – and he really would just look at me like I was speaking silly words. I’d say -this orange is the color orange. What color is it? And I would get this blank stare… red? It sort of makes you want to go a little nutty some days! Well, I wanted to make some cookies and I thought it would be fun to sort m&ms into different colors to add to our cookies. (I am known for doing this: red/blue for independence day, red/green for Christmas, brown/orange for Thanksgiving, blue/yellow for Notre Dame football (Go Irish!), the fun is endless. Anyway -so, we were sorting out the red and green to make Christmas cookies (post coming soon!).
I was working with my 2 year old and my 4 year old and I was actually quite amazed that he was doing it! He was putting the m&ms in the correct colors! I have done this activity with him before and was not so fortunate, but this time he understood! So, I would just do one color at a time. Let’s find all the red ones! And he found them, then we did green, then blue, etc. It was a fun activity, (and a sweet one too!). My four year old is working on his letters so natually m&m is a great one for teaching him to recognize the lower case letter m!
This activity is great for fine motor skills too! It is hard to pick up those little m&ms – (and children are certainly eager to do it!)
Other things you can do to help teach the colors:
-Add food coloring to a glass of milk and focus on that color for the day.
-When coloring, just focus on coloring with one or two colors.
-Stop signs are red. Point this out when you are driving. Point out the colors of the stop lights.
Here is a fun video to watch and dance to- (great for a gross motor reading readiness activity):
Also, find out if you child is ready to read using our free reading readiness test.
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