Learning colors for kindergarten
10 Activities for Teaching Colors in Kindergarten
Curriculum | Featured
Teaching colors in kindergarten is an important and fun skill to teach. These kindergarten color activities will make learning hands-on and engaging all year long. Plus, your students will work on math, literacy, fine motor, and problem-solving skills along the way.
Colors and Color Word Activities for Kindergarten
Teaching colors and color words in kindergarten helps students to visually discriminate colors and begin working with colors in different subjects, such as math, literacy, and art.
From sorting, graphing, reading color words in sentences, and identifying colors in art, teaching colors is an important life skill for young learners.
#1. I Spy!
I Spy! is a kid-favorite when it comes to kindergarten color activities. This game can easily be incorporated anytime of day, whether it’s a morning warm-up, carpet game, or quick time-filler activity.
To play, one person is the “spy.” They look around the room and say “I spy something (green/blue/red).” Students then take turns raising their hand and guessing what it is. The first student that guesses correctly is the next “spy.”
Using color games with students is an effective way to engage them and practice skills in a fun way.
#2. Scavenger Hunt
Another way to get your students active and engaged in the learning is to do a color scavenger hunt. To play, draw different colored circles in the middle of various notecards. You can use as many colors as you’d like to work on.
The students will draw a notecard, identify the color, and go around the classroom to find something in that color. When they find something in the matching color, they stop and raise their hand in place.
Once everyone has found a match, go around the room calling on students one at a time and have them share their color and what the object is.
Have them return to their seats, pass their cards to the left, and repeat the scavenger hunt again with their new colors.
Another option is to do this activity in small groups. Give students 2-4 notecards and have them go around the room and collect objects. Then, they return to the small group table and match the object to the correct color notecard before switching cards.
#3. Color Patterns
Whenever you can combine your kindergarten color activities with math, that’s a teacher win! Practice identifying colors and making patterns with different colored counting bears, color links, or plastic cubes.
You can call out a pattern and have students model it with their manipulatives. You can also use pattern cards to help students model various patterns, such as AB, AAB, ABB, ABC, and AABB patterns.
#4. Color Sorts
A simple yet effective kindergarten color activity is to have students practice sorting by color and saying the colors out loud.
You can give students a handful of manipulatives, such as pattern blocks, colored cereal, plastic cubes, mini erasers, color links, etc.
Have them sort the manipulatives by color and identify the color by saying it out loud.
To take it a step further, ask students to count how many are in each category to practice math skills.
Another variation of this activity would be to have different colored cups or containers and have students sort their pile into the proper cup or container.
If you don’t have different colored cups or containers, you can write the color word in a colorful marker on a sticky note and stick it to the outside of any cup or container you have on hand. This would help students learn their color words as well.
#5. Egg Carton Fill
This color activity uses both color knowledge and fine motor skills. Prepare an egg carton by coloring a circle on the bottom of each space in an egg carton. You could also use a colored circle sticker instead and stick it in the bottom of the spaces.
Have students use jumbo tweezers to sort colored pom poms into the correct spaces in the egg carton, matching the colors of the pom poms to the circles.
This would be a great small group or fine motor center activity.
#6. Play Dough Color Count
Play dough is a great manipulative to keep on hand when teaching colors. Students can practice identifying colors and counting at the same time.
To prepare, write different color words in the corresponding color with marker on notecards. Students will draw a color card to determine which play dough color they’ll use. Then, they’ll roll a dot cube and count the dots. Finally, they’ll form that many play dough balls in the correct color, counting as they go.
Students can do this activity at a small group table or desk or with a color matching mat.
#7. Color Call Out
The next kindergarten color activity is another super easy, no prep game that can be played at any time.
To play, stand in circle as a whole group. One person calls out a color. Starting with the person to the left of them, each student says a real world object that is that color. After every student has said an object, the whole class spells the color word together.
Students take turns being the “caller” and calling out the next color.
#8. Roll and Match Colors
Color Roll and Cover is a fun game for students that makes practicing colors super fun.
You can use a color cube or a dry-erase cube to write color words or draw colored circles on. Students will roll the cube and cover a space on their roll and cover mat with a matching colored manipulative. The first student to cover the most spaces wins.
This activity is one of the activities found in the Let’s Learn Colors Mini Unit.
#9. Bingo Dabber Activities
Bingo dabbers are perfect for several kindergarten color activities. You can give students a white piece of paper and have them write color words using the matching color of bingo dabber. This also gives students a little fine motor practice while forming the words.
Another option is to have students dab freely on a white piece of paper and have them say the color word each time they dab.
To practice spelling the color word, they could even say a letter each time they dab to spell the color word.
Once the word is complete, they switch colors.
#10. Color Boom Cards
Using digital kindergarten color activities is another way to practice colors while engaging your students. Students can practice color recognition with real world objects or even color discrimination with Boom Cards.
They’ll hear the color words in the audio directions, giving them even more exposure to colors and color words.
I hope these 10 kindergarten color activities have given you some fresh ideas that you can implement with your students.
Looking for more colors and color words activities for kindergarten? Check out my Let’s Learn Colors Bundle, complete with color activities, centers, games, and no prep pages.
Post Tags: #color words#colors
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20 Engaging Hands-On Activities for Learning Colors
Activities
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These hands-on activities for learning colors are such a fun way to teach and reinforce important preschool and kindergarten concepts.
Preschoolers can have fun while learning colors with a variety of simple activities. For example, playing with a color wheel and matching different shades of the same color, observing food items and sorting them according to their colors, or creating art projects such as painting shapes in different colors.
All of the color activities featured here will help young children practice their color recognition skills enjoyably and creatively!
Learning Colors Hands-On ActivitiesLearning the colors of the rainbow is an important part of preschoolers’ cognitive development. Through color recognition and matching activities, kids learn to differentiate between basic colors, recognize patterns, and expand their visual-spatial awareness.
Color learning activities can also help foster creative thinking and problem-solving skills in children as they engage in imaginative play throughout the preschool years and beyond.
Why Color Recognition Should Be Fun and Engaging
Color recognition activities need to be engaging and enjoyable for younger children for them to learn effectively.
Engaging in activities such as matching, sorting, or painting can ignite a child’s curiosity and help them remain focused on the task at hand.
Through stimulating play, they can discover the pleasure of exploration while also learning valuable skills.
When should kids learn colors?
Kids usually start to recognize and name colors by age 3. When learning colors, preschoolers typically start with primary colors (red, blue, and yellow), followed by secondary colors (orange, green, and purple), and then tertiary colors.
To facilitate learning, parents should create fun activities like sorting objects by color or playing games like I Spy where little children need to find something that’s a certain color.
There are plenty of fun and creative activities out there to help children learn about color recognition.
These activities can be used at home or in the classroom, providing an engaging way for kids to develop essential skills such as hand-eye coordination, fine motor skills, visual-spatial abilities, and more.
With so many options available, you’re sure to find something that your little one will love!
So grab some craft sticks, markers, or paints and get ready for a colorful adventure with your preschooler!
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Learning colors: how to teach a child to distinguish colors and shades
It is generally accepted that by the age of three a child should learn to distinguish between primary colors. This skill is an important part of sensory development, it gives the child the opportunity to see the world in a new way. Often, if the baby does not know or confuse colors, parents have concerns about the pace of development of the child.
Do I need to worry if the study of colors is not easy for a child? How to teach a child to distinguish colors? You will find answers to these questions in our article.
At what age does a child begin to see colors?
Studies have shown that children begin to perceive colors by 2-3 months. The first colors a child sees are yellow, orange, red, green. At this age, babies can already react differently to their toys of different colors (for example, a red rattle can please a child more than a blue one), look at bright pictures with enthusiasm. The baby's world quickly acquires colors, but if we talk about the ability to consciously find an object of the right color, then usually it appears in children at the age of one and a half. It is at this age that it is optimal to start learning colors in a playful way. You can voice the names of flowers to a child for up to a year, this will only benefit him. But do not demand too much from the baby, remember that his brain is actively developing, and as soon as the time comes, you will certainly see the results.
To see if your child is ready to learn colors by playing with building blocks, ask your child to point to a part that is the same color as yours. If the baby can find objects of the same color, then he is quite ready to memorize the names of colors.
Learning colors in everyday life
Children get most of their knowledge about the world in everyday life: communicating with adults and peers, observing nature, playing. The study of flowers is no exception. Sometimes a child does not need to do special exercises to learn to recognize colors. For this, it is enough that he hears the name of the color and associates it with a specific thing. During daily activities, voice for the child what color the objects are around. Whether you are drawing, playing with blocks, looking at cars in the yard, reading, swimming, eating, dressing - in each of these situations, you can gently teach your child to distinguish colors.
It is important that the study of colors does not turn into torture. You should not constantly test the child's knowledge by asking him which color is which. Soon the baby may just start to ignore you. “Let's paint the sun yellow!”, “What a delicious green cucumber!”, “Oh, where did the blue cube go? Here he is!" are examples of how you can gently help your child remember colors.
Games for learning colors and their shades
In order to get your baby interested in learning colors or to reinforce the knowledge they already have, you can offer your child to play special “color” games.
Color Sorting
Sorting games are designed to help children learn to group objects by color. Any materials at hand can be items for sorting: toys, covers, designer parts, cubes, buttons, cereals, pencils, etc. You can organize the game in various ways:
You can come up with as many options for sorting by color, it all depends on your imagination.
So that the child does not lose interest in the task, connect the plot of the game with his favorite characters, toys (for example, a cat will eat from a yellow bowl, and a baby elephant from a red one, etc.).
Match a Pair
Help your child learn colors with the Match a Pair series. Ask your child to find a petal for a bug, a pot for a flower, a roof for a house, etc. You can present the baby with a deliberately wrong option and ask to correct the mistakes.
Pick up a patch
Show the child the picture with the missing details. Ask him to fill in the gaps (this can be done with plasticine, pom-poms, caps, cards, etc.).
Color Lotto
At the age of about one year, children begin to be interested in various lottos. In the color lotto, the task is to collect pictures of the same color on the card.
Colored Sensory Boxes
Create a sensory box for your baby where everything is the same color. During the game, the child will be able not only to remember the color that he sees, but also to develop fine motor skills, tactile sensitivity, thinking, and imagination.
Color days
This is one of the most interesting and popular ways to teach your child to distinguish colors. Its essence is that during the day (or several days) you draw the child's attention to objects of a certain color. For example, on a yellow day, you can dress in yellow clothes, play with yellow toys, draw a yellow chicken. Surrounded by one color, the baby will easily remember it.
Cards for learning colors
You can learn colors with your child using cards. With the help of Doman's "Colors" cards, you can introduce your baby not only to the main colors, but also to different shades. It is important not to overload the child with unnecessary information about the names of 10 shades of green or red. Learn only those shades whose names you can use in the game and life.
Board games for learning colors
Board games are a great way to learn about colors and consolidate knowledge about them. Currently, the stores offer a wide range of similar games for every taste and budget.
Choose a game that suits your child.
Educational cartoons
There are many educational cartoons on the Internet that will help your child memorize colors quickly. Here is one of them:
Educational books
If your little one loves to listen to stories and look at pictures, this is the way for you. We all remember the wonderful story of V.G. Suteev "Rooster and paints", by S.Ya. Marshak has a whole “Colorful book”. You can also find many educational books that will become your faithful assistants.
Conclusions
We have listed for you different color learning games. In order for a child to master the concept of color well, it is worth adhering to a number of principles: do not rush the baby, provide a variety of material for games, discuss what you see.
Conclusion
You can start studying colors from an early age, the main thing is that it is interesting for the child.
It is impossible to specify clear age limits when a child should learn primary colors. This process, like all development, is individual for each baby. The Sozvezdie Development Center has created a Montessori environment for kids, aimed at the comprehensive development of the child. In the classes "Together with Mom" children in a playful way get acquainted with the concepts of color, shape and size, do thematic creative work. You can learn from our teachers how to interest a child in an activity and how to properly present him with cognitive information. Develop with us!
Prepared by a Montessori teacher
Sokolova Oksana
teaching colors to children in English
How to keep your child from getting bored and not turn learning into torture.
In this article you will find all the information about how the colors will be in English with translation for children. As well as games, interesting memory rhymes and much more to help your child learn English flower names.
The human eye can distinguish a huge number of shades of our bright and diverse world. The average person is well versed in about 150 primary colors, but a professional can already distinguish up to 10 thousand shades under certain conditions.
But for children, everything is much simpler: in order to understand the world around them and describe it, they need to know only a few basic colors in their native language. Today we will tell you how best to present basic colors in English for children so that they are interested, and parents do not get bored.
Basic colors and concepts
Before you teach your child about colors, you need to be sure that you yourself know the basic concepts and definitions.
Color . This is how the word "color" is translated into English.
Note that the "-ur" ending is the British spelling. In American English, this word would be spelled "color". It is included in the top differences between British and American English, which you can read more about in this article.
By the way, the gray color will also have different spellings: gray (BrE) and gray (AmE).
Each color has a huge number of shades (shades), they can be warm (warm) or cold (cool), neutral (neutral) or saturated (intense / vibrant).
There are 15 primary colors, which are considered basic and are the basis for other shades.
Of which 3 are neutral:
- white
- black
- gray
And 12 - the rest:
- red
- orange
- brown
- beige
- yellow
- light green
- green
- light blue
- blue-green
- blue
- violet / purple
- pink / magenta
If you need English for children, you don't have to learn colors all at once. Start with the primary colors: red (red), green (green), blue (blue), yellow (yellow) and, of course, do not forget about black (black) and white (white).
Complex colors can be designated by simply adding two basic names.
For example: red-orange (red-orange), blue-violet (blue-violet) and so on. However, such colors in English for children should be used only when the child is already well aware of the names of the primary colors. And how the baby to learn them - read below.
Learning colors: games and memory
The easiest way for a child to memorize the colors that often surround him in everyday life and in subjects familiar to him. Fruits and vegetables are good for this purpose. Learning colors in this way, English for children will not be another boring activity, but an exciting game. And parents, in turn, will be able to easily feed the child with healthy products, which is sometimes not so easy to do.
Look in the refrigerator. Which of the products available there can clearly demonstrate color to a child? Here are the simplest examples: green apple, orange carrot, yellow banana, red tomato, white milk, brown potato, and so on. True, not all of them can be found in the refrigerator, so it is better to take children's toys or cards as examples of colors such as purple, pink, blue, beige and black.
For practice, ask your child questions about the color of an object in English. So you will not only repeat the colors with him, but also learn the names of the things around you. Visual demonstrations are one of the best ways of remembering not only for children, but also for adults, because visual memory is also connected to auditory memory. If you don't have the items you need, you can always use ready-made picture cards or other simple and clear images.
Even during everyday activities and games with children, you can start a dialogue game with them and ask questions about colors:
What color is this apple? (What color is this apple?)
— It's green. (It's green)
What color is this banana? (What color is this banana?)
— It's yellow. (He is yellow)
and so on.
One of the good and versatile items for learning colors with a child is regular colored pencils. The standard set contains all the colors you need to learn, and the process itself can easily be turned into another game.
Ask your child questions about color, taking different pencils out of the box one by one:
What color is this pencil? (What color is this pencil?)
— It's pink. (He's pink)
— And what color is this one? (What color is this one?)
Blue. (Blue)
and so on.
The same pencils can be used to create color cards. Cut out rectangles from white cardboard and color them, signing each of them with a color in English. Cards can be taken with you and entertain the child during a walk. For example, taking out a green card, ask him to remember the name of the color and find it on the street. The child, in turn, must find a green object (grass, leaves, etc.) and show it to you.
When the child knows the basic names of colors and can easily distinguish them, you can move on to more complex exercises at home, which will not only help him remember the colors, but also keep him busy for a while.
First, ask him to draw you the subject you learned color from.
For example, yellow banana, red tomato, pink pig, etc. When the child can easily cope with this task, complicate it as follows: let the child draw something using an unusual color for this. Purple lemon (violet lemon), pink banana (pink banana) and more, what your imagination is capable of.
One of the easiest ways to learn primary colors is, of course, the rainbow. It consists of seven bright colors, the names of which should already be known to the child in Russian. Therefore, when your baby can name all the colors of the rainbow in the correct order without errors, then you can replace the Russian names of colors with English ones. For clarity, it is better to use the image of the rainbow or draw it yourself.
Play a puzzle game with your child: take colored cards and show them to your child and say the wrong color. He, in turn, must correct you and say the correct color in English. Believe me, the child will enjoy correcting you and “winning” in this game.
Another variant of the mindfulness game is to take cards already well known to the child, ask him to close his eyes, remove one of the colors and ask him to name the color that is missing.
Also, in learning colors in English with a child, parents will come to the aid of cartoons and educational videos. As a rule, all children's cartoons are bright and colorful. The main and secondary characters have their own distinctive colors, and that's exactly what you need to ask them to name the child during the next viewing.
There are many ways to make English fun for toddlers. Colors can also be taught with the help of special verses and "agreements". These are such short rhyming couplets that end in the name of a certain color in English.
Here are some of them:
I will catch fish in the sea,
In the blue sea, blue - blue
Hey, look here quickly:
Gray bunny jumps - gray
Ripe, fresh apples color
English red - red
White snow flies in winter,
White, in English - white
White snow began to melt,
And the earth turns black
We picked ripe apples,
Yellow-yellow, it means - yellow
Orange box full,
All orange
The boy Styopa ate grapes,
Purple he is purple
Frog, look,
All so green - green
We all like chocolate,
He is brown, he is brown
Mischievous pig
pink
You can always come up with your own agreements and rhymes.
There is also an English verse for memorizing flowers and things around the child:
Let's learn the colors song together
An apple is red, a lemon is yellow
Leaves are green, the sky is blue
Carrot is orange, berries are purple
Night and day for black and white
Rainbows are always bright
Let's sing a song of flowers together
Apple - red, lemon - yellow
Leaves are green, sky is blue
Carrots - orange, berries - purple
Night and day - black and white,
Rainbows are always bright
And here is a funny song with color memorization actions:
If you are wearing red, shake your head.
If you are wearing blue, touch your shoe.
If you are wearing green, bow to the queen.
If you are wearing yellow, shake like Jell-O.
If you are wearing black, pat your back.
If you are wearing brown, turn around.
If you wear red, shake your head.
If you're wearing blue, touch your boot.
If you wear green, bow to the queen.
If you're wearing yellow, shake like jelly.
If you're wearing black, pat yourself on the back.
If you're wearing brown, turn around.
As you can see, English is not that difficult: colors for kids are a simple and fun topic if you get creative with it. Here are some more tips for learning colors with kids:
- Look in the mirror
We often need colors to describe someone's appearance. Start with yourself and your child. Name your eye color (I have green eyes - I have green eyes) and ask the child to say what color his eyes are. Remember with him the colors of the eyes of mom, dad, grandma, grandpa and other family members.
- Look around
It will be easy for a child to learn colors when he sees them in front of him regularly. For example, taking a banana out of the refrigerator, ask the child to remember its color in English (yellow), ask what T-shirt he wants to wear today (black, white or blue - black, white or blue), what color is his toothbrush, cup and so on.
- Make stickers
Connect visual memory to the study of colors: choose objects at home that best match a particular color and stick stickers with the name of the color on them. After that, you can complicate the task and add the name of the subject itself so that the child expands his vocabulary. For example: brown chair (brown chair), white lamp (white lamp), red book (red book), etc.
- Repeat
As soon as you learn the basic colors in English with your child, look for any convenient opportunity to practice them. It is best to talk about everything that meets the child around. At the same time, it is worth making simple, but whole sentences, and not learning colors out of context. Let the child name the color of a certain object not just like that (blue, yellow, green), but with a complete sentence: The sky is blue (The sky is blue), The grass is green (Green grass), This bus is yellow (This bus is yellow), etc. .d. This will help him, firstly, immediately form speech and be able to express his thoughts more fully, and, secondly, will allow him to expand his basic vocabulary.
