How to teach a toddler to identify colors correctly?

Question

Perhaps I am rushing a bit but I'd rather ask and get feedback rather than just let it slide. I've recently been working on teaching colors to my 2 year old daughter. She can say the common colors if repeating after me, but when I ask her to identify the color of an object, she always defaults to "green".

Is this normal? Is she perhaps confused about what I am asking her at this moment in time and I will see positive results later? When she gets one wrong, it's not like I get on to her or anything crazy like that. I just tell her the actual color, she repeats and we move on...and the next object is green too.

Am I doing something wrong? Am I expecting too much?

Answer 1

You should also consider that 2-year-olds often don't react as expected when quizzed. My son (almost 3) is pretty intelligent for his age, but if I ask him what he did today, no matter what we did, he "played cars and trains". If I ask him what he had for lunch, it was "macaroni and cheese". He seems to find an answer that is a valid answer sometimes, and uses it every time that question is asked, because he doesn't really understand the concepts being discussed (in particular, he doesn't really understand 'past' and 'future', as most kids don't at that age). He knows what he did, but he doesn't know how to discuss it.

So your daughter may know the colors, but not know to correlate the idea of a green thing being green to being asked 'what color is this?'. To help that along, I would recommend having multiple identical objects of different colors - for my son, it was colorful wooden alphabet blocks with pictures on one side of animals along with alphabet/numbers - and then just talk about how this is the 'green' block and this is the 'blue' block, etc. Differentiating objects by their color helps to explain the concept that objects 'have' colors.

Answer 2

It's normal, and you're expecting too much. Colors are hard, for a variety of reasons explained in this article:

• Colors are not a thing like a "ball" or a "dog", but a property of a thing
• Colors are societal construct interpreted differently in different languages, with lots of gray areas even within a language (is that particular shade red or orange?)
• English has the unhelpful feature of placing adjectives before nouns, which makes them even harder for kids to understand

All told, your kid's doing OK if she can reliably recognize one (1) color by the time they're three, and it's not unusual for six-year-olds to still have trouble.

Answer 3

Color is a difficult thing to teach . . . they don't know that you're talking about a quality rather than an object.

• Kid: "Hey, just a moment ago, they told me that was an elephant, and now it's a grey. I'm so confused."

My daughter got it all at once when we were driving at night. The traffic lights had no visible structure beyond a circle of light. When I asked her the colors as we crossed through town, she made the connection.

• Kesley (as I imagine it in her mind): "Ah! Red! Green! That's what they mean!"

She'll get it, and soon.

Answer 4

Pick the colors you want to teach.

Get some magnetic fridge magnets in that color. Let's say they are dog shaped

Put them on the Fridge

Tell him to go get the 'Red dog'

If he comes back with the red one, praise him, throw him up in the air, hug em. Say "Yes, this one is Red!."

"Now go get me the blue Dog"... Rinse repeat.

If he comes back with the wrong one, point out that it is a dog, but it is a green one instead of the pink one. Can you find me the pink one?

Positive feedback on a find. Good feedback with correction on a miss.

This is how my daughter learned her colors and numbers.

It was fun too.

Answer 5

Do like my stepfather did with my stepbrother:

Requirements:

1. 1 bag of M & M's or similar colored treats.
2. A little patience

Now, tell your child they will get the M&M's they correctly identify the color of. In your case, it will turn out like this: "Green, green, green, green....... Red? Yellow? Blue? Blue, blue, blue, blue...... Red? Yellow? Yellow, yellow, yellow, yellow." Etc.

Rewards can be powerful.

Answer 6

The difficulty for the child to understand is that colors are something abstract, so something they cannot take into their hands and play with. But at this age touching something is an important factor in learning.

An idea would be to get colored plastic sheets (yellow, magenta, cyan) and show them what happens when you look through them. This allows your child to actually play with something in his/her hands, and makes the abstract concept graspable, so to speak.

Answer 7

I read about a study that seems to imply that certain colors are easier to understand than others. They tracked primitive cultures' names for colors and found a natural sequence:

Though I haven't seen this applied specifically to parenting, it does seem to imply that a child would be best served by learning light-dark distinction first, then learn to distinguish red, etc.

Answer 8

I like to play the I-spy game

I spy is a guessing game. One player chooses an object that is visible to all the players and says, "I spy with my little eye something beginning with ...", naming the letter the chosen object starts with (e.g. "I spy with my little eye something beginning with C" if the chosen object is a car). Other players have to guess the chosen object.[1] An alternative version is played where the colour is given rather than the initial letter (e.g. "I spy with my little eye something blue")

You can play it anywhere and also train general observation skills. In my experience, kids can play it from about 18-24 months old.

Answer 9

I recently read a scientific study that indicated that English-speaking kids had a harder time with colors than other kids, because the English language typically places the color before the name of the object ("The blue ball") rather than after ("The ball that is blue").

In the latter construct, the kid sees the ball, then hears the name of the color, so it can be associated as a characteristic of that object. When the researchers used slightly artificial constructs ("Look at that nice car. It's blue!" rather than "Oh, look at that nice blue car"), kids learned their colors much faster.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-johnny-name-colors/

But really, technicalities aside, it's not a race...

Answer 10

This is a follow up to Joe's answer, which presents a concept of talking about the colors, not quizzing. This is how I used that concept.

My two and a half year old was having a hard time with colors. Our day care teacher said all the other kids had mastered them but he hadn't. We started working with him, quizzing him, and rewarding correct answers. A month later, basically zero progress. While watching a color-teaching kids video, I discovered he knew all the colors as associated with Paw Patrol cartoon characters, e.g. red=Marshall, blue=Chase, etc. The problem I had was disassociating Paw Patrol names with the names of colors. I read Joe's answer and liked the concept. So I focused on using the colors often when talking to him, rather than trying to explicitly teach him. For example, instead of asking him the color of the red had, I would say, "there's the red hat", or, "there's the blue ball", "a yellow lemon", etc.

The most important thing I did was trying to teach him while riding in the car. He loves building things with large-sized Legos. So I put one of each color Lego in the car, and asked him if he wanted to play with them. He was excited and was reaching for them. I would then ask him which color he wanted, and he would say Marshall (red), I would correct him, "you mean red", he would repeat "red". Then I would give the red Lego to him. Next he might ask for Chase (blue). I corrected him again and waited for him to say blue. In the 30 minute daily drive we did this for about half the drive. Towards the end of the week he became bored with the game, but after a few weeks of this, plus using colors often when speaking with him, he has pretty much completely mastered all basic colors, blue, red, yellow, green, purple, orange, white, and pink. Now when I quiz him he gives the correct answers.

This is an excellent teaching tool. I will be trying the same with numbers and letters.

Answer 11

Is this normal?

Yes, it is.

One of my kids is like that; everything is "red". When asked to match colors, though, she can. What I did was show her colour swatches and asked her to show me things that were the same colour.

If I showed her the yellow swatch and asked her to show me something that was the same colour, she picked my yellow sweater. This meant she could differentiate the colors themselves; it was just the names that confused her.

Answer 12

This is adapted from an answer to another question: 2,5 year old girl always picks black

Specifically, the linked source in that answer, Why Johnny Can't Name His Colors, mentions prenominal versus postnominal use of colors. This set me on track to this research article, Surprise in the Learning of Color Words (PDF).

The research suggests that using postnominal (or post-nominal) training is better for teaching children colors than prenominal training.

Results indicate that children as young as 2 years begin to reliably master color words when hearing them in training presented post-nominally, but not pre-nominally, and that adults challenged with learning novel color categories are affected by the same ordering effects. We suggest that children’s difficulty with color word learning is in part due to the challenge of having to make predictions from words to the properties they refer to, rather than being able to make predictions from the world to the words.

Examples:

• Prenominal: "The red ball." The color comes before (pre) the noun (nominal)
• Postnominal: "The ball that is red." The color comes after (post) the noun (nominal)

Now, I don't mean to merely replicate @Bossykena's answer. I think the study I linked to provides better support for using postnominal training.

When I read the answer on the other question, we were having trouble getting my son to identify colors correctly. So, with the study in hand, my wife and I proceeded to use color descriptions almost exclusively in a postnominal fashion.

We saw immediate results. His grasp of colors and ability to identify similar objects correctly by their colors grew enormously in a short time. The largest results were in the first couple of weeks.

We would also go out of our way to include color descriptions when speaking to him. We were already doing that in a prenominal fashion, but without much success. This leads me to give credit solely to the postnominal training.

At the same time, we also tried to increase our use of American Sign Language when using colors. The ASL usage did not appear to have any real effect at that time, but we did not put a particular emphasis on the ASL at the time. Mainly, it was used to reinforce that the color words were the "key" words of the sentences. With our new child, we'll likely place a greater emphasis on ASL during color learning, mostly because our own confidence in ASL has grown.

Since we don't know for sure that the ASL helped, but it was a factor, I felt it worth mentioning. If nothing else, it may help you feel like you're doing more, which can be emotionally satisfying on its own.

In short:

1. Use postnominal color descriptions: "The bucket that is yellow."
2. Describe objects with colors more often (or parts of objects): "Go get your socks that have bottoms that are black."
3. Try including ASL if you want more physical/active training