oh bother. blog

I’ve kind of been freaking out lately trying to teach Holden her colors. She’s only 16 months old. I know I’m a weirdo.
She has these School Zone and PlaySkool flash cards that she loves to play with. She sniffs the flower when she sees it, touches her head when she sees a hat, wrinkles her nose when she sees the pig. So I thought… why not use cards to identify her colors? I made super awesome index card color flash cards with my trusty Mr. Sketch markers.

They aren’t exactly… catching on. And I was kind of weirding out, wondering what was up with my otherwise bright child. And then I Googled and it turns out… Kids can’t really identify colors until they’re like 4 or 5 years old.

Though it might seem easy to grasp, learning colors can be a challenging task for children.  Children often learn names of nouns before they learn descriptive words about those nouns (like colors) and can be easily confused when an array of colors are present in a large group. The typical developmental timeline is that children name some colors correctly by the end of their fourth year. At age five, children should correctly name at least four colors. 

Makes sense, I guess. I was having a really hard time describing what color is. Try it; not easy.
Anyway, I’m going to ease up on the Ivy League preparations and just have fun with watching her learn and grow every day. But I will keep telling her that flower is purple, the hat is brown and the pig is pink. Do you have tips for teaching colors?