8 Fun Ideas to Teach Colors to Children
Today, we’re going to suggest activities to learn, play, create and have a great time with your children! Don’t miss our selection of fun ideas to teach colors to children.
Parents use colors to interact with their children from an early age, thus stimulating their skills and visual development. For example, they show the baby objects and say “look at the blue rattle” or “the pink teddy wants to hug you”.
These early experiences are studied at the Color Group & Baby Lab Research Laboratory at the University of Sussex. There, scientists have concluded that babies perceive colors, have their preferences, and these are maintained as they grow.
However, it’s only between 12 and 18 months that children can participate more actively in learning, as well as being able to identify and name colors.
Now’s the right time to teach colors to children!
Ideas to teach colors to children: Games, crafts, and more
Learning is best achieved if the activity is attractive. Therefore, what better way to assimilate new knowledge than through playing?
“Play is one of the most important ways young children gain essential knowledge and skills.”
-UNICEF-
1. Create a rainbow of colors
Making a rainbow to decorate the room is an idea that your little ones will love. This activity brings together several meaningful and fun experiences, such as drawing, painting, and shaping a new object.
Search the internet for the sequence of colors in a rainbow and then prepare everything. Place a piece of white cardboard on the table, containers with various colors of watercolors, a bottle of water, and brushes. Let’s paint, get dirty, and have fun!
2. Play the traditional “I spy”
“I spy with my little eye, something…..”
This classic game is great for learning colors and relating them to everyday objects.
3. Decree a color day at home
Create a calendar and determine the colors for different days. The goal is for everything that you do at home during that day to be related to the chosen color.
For example, Sunday is green, so everyone dresses in green clothes, eats green salads, uses a green tablecloth, and drinks green juice.
4. Assemble a color box
If you like the Montessori method, this idea to teach colors to children is perfect for you to put into practice.
It involves taking a common box and placing manipulable objects in it, such as figures, cards, tables, or color palettes.
The child will be curious about the things they’ll find inside. As they take them out, ask them to tell you the color of each one and play with the objects in question. For example, group all the ones that are blue, red, or green.
5. Create a colorful garden
Among the fun ideas to teach colors to children, we can’t leave out making crafts.
For this idea, you need a disposable tray and colored clay. The idea is for the child to mold flowers, leaves, stems, and build a beautiful garden on the tray.
This experience is a fantastic way to stimulate fine motor skills, activate creativity, and induce children to be interested in the elements of nature.
7. Geometry and colors
This idea is great for teaching colors and shapes.
Take foam rubber craft sheets of different colors and mark and cut out triangles, squares, circles, rhombuses, stars, and moons.
Put all the pieces in a bag and start playing with your child. The objective is to take out the figures one by one and for your child to group them as you ask: By colors or by shapes.
8. Apps to learn colors
Another entertaining way to teach colors is to take advantage of technology, something that children really like.
Applications have the advantage of being interactive, colorful, and producing sounds that stimulate little ones even more. Some of the programs that you can use are the following:
- Patchimals – Shapes and Colors: a fun to download from the Play Store.
- Colors Touch | App for Kindergarten and Preschool Kids, designed for iPad
Colors: Allies of the teaching-learning process
Colors are a manifestation of the decomposition of light. According to what they explain in the didactics module in the plastic arts of the International University of La Rioja:
“The tone is each of the bands into which white sunlight is divided when it is decomposed by a prism. We call these bands colors and they’re classified into seven: Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. From these colors, intermediate tones are derived.
When children learn to differentiate the different colors and their shades, a world of possibilities for creation and expression opens up. And as they grow, they begin to use colors to express their emotions, to speak about what they observe, and to communicate with their peers, their teachers, or their parents.
All learning is important for the comprehensive development of your child, so we invite you to put these fun ideas into practice to teach colors to children. The goal is for them to enjoy a creative and enriching afternoon of pure color!
All cited sources were thoroughly reviewed by our team to ensure their quality, reliability, currency, and validity. The bibliography of this article was considered reliable and of academic or scientific accuracy.
- Andueza, M., Barbero, A., Caeiro, M., da Silva, A., García, J., Gonzlaez, A., Muñiz, A., Torres, A. (2016) Didáctica de las artes plásticas y visuales en Educación Infantil. Universidad Internacional de la Rioja, España. Disponible en: https://www.unir.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Manual_DIDACTICA_PLASTICA_.pdf
- Lego Foundation (2018) El aprendizaje a través del juego. UNICEF. Disponible en: https://www.unicef.org/sites/default/files/2019-01/UNICEF-Lego-Foundation-Aprendizaje-a-traves-del-juego.pdf
- The Sussex Colour Group & Baby Lab – Research Lab based at the University of Sussex. Disponible en: https://www.sussexcolourgroup.co.uk/
