my daughter is 19months, almost 20, and we’ve been teaching her lots of stuff, using ybcr regularly, LR on and off, as she is a very active baby and wants to turn off the computer when doing lessons with her. for some reason, she doesn’t show any signs of reading, or recogniaing words. i try not to test her anyway. i’m not worried, but i would wish she could by now recognize words.
my main concern though is that i’ve been teaching her colours for a while, flash cards, LR, pointing and naming the different colours, but she doesnt seem to know the colours. we started teachiung her colour blue, and she just calls everything blue! one good thing i guess is that at least she knows that blue is a colour!
any suggestions please on teaching colours. thanks.
Have you considered sign language? I don’t know how much your LO is speaking, but perhaps some of the words are harder to get out by speaking, so she goes with “blue”. I’d recommend signing time, i think it’s volume 6, My Favorite Things.
I absolutely ADORE the preschool prep company DVD’s…Meet the Shapes, Colors, Numbers, Letters, and Sight Words 1, 2, and 3. My daughter mastered all of the material in3 months or so, and I have friends that are having excellent results with it as well.
Check your local teacher store (if you are the in the US) and they should carry Meet the Colors, if not, they sell them on Ebay or www.preschoolprepco.com , just leave the tv on the background while she’s playing. She’ll pick it up in no time!
I googled " teach colours toddler" or something similar and I got some very useful tips which I do not remember now.
I used free ppt presentation from brillkids. My girl liked it very much and learned 10 colours easy.
the key is to show similar objects with different colours. If you show red crayon and blue ball, there are many differences and kid can not understand what is the colour. If you show red ball and blue ball it is easy to understand.
I try naming colours to her all the time, for instance, instead of saying ‘can you pick up your shoes’, i try to say ‘can you pick up your blue shoes’. i think she just likes the sound of blue! funny thing, i gave her a book today and she started pointing at random pictures and saying ‘lelo’ ie yellow, purple, (not corresponding to the exact colours though)so she does know there are other colours apart from blue, but she is yet to name them appropriately.
I hope it’ll turn out like her signing. for months she watched baby signing time and i would try to get her to sign, she managed just a few signs initially, and just all of a sudden, she started to sign a lot, now, she can do at least 30 signs! i’m really glad and encouraged with that, it could get a bit frustrating sometimes when she doesn’t seem to be able to identify any words,especially when I read what other babies are doing!
I guess the important thing is that she loves watching her dvds, she absolutely loves your baby can read dvds and would sit through the whole thing, repeats all the words, now once it starts, she says ‘hi, my name is aleka’! really cute!
well, I’ll continue trying to teach colours and I hope one day, she’ll suprise me!
lilyandowensmom- thanks for the link, the dvds look really nice. I read the reviews and all, i’m very interested.
Here is my blog for some ideas to make this activities fun . http://olivesandpickles.blogspot.com/2010/07/learning-colors.html
There are other activities for colors (I have to say is one topic I really love teaching).
Don’t foget that toddlers love to touch stuff, learn by senses, even if they make a mess is such a fun way they get the idea.
-Use some food coloring and put some few drops in a bucket of water, let her play with the different colors and get wet.
-Another day present to her one color a day…take her around the house and collect objects …for example red… get some red shoes, red pants,red plates,red cups,red balls, red paper, red crayons (let her color or paint)…everything red. The next day you will do the same but with other color…(start with the basic colors).
-Get a book(also you can make it yourself) of colors, paste different pictures of magazines by colors. What I did is tape little tinny objects ,like bottons,ribbons,bracelts…etc in construction paper and make a book from it divided in colors.
-Also you can make some ice cubs in differnt colors using food coloring… I made last week ice pops with fun colors.
-Also you can make play dough in different colors using food coloring. (just google for recipes of how to make homemade playdough).
I have some more ideas on my blog…I can go on and on. I just love using food coloring and felt…are just like magic, you can use them in so many cool stuff.
You can try to go to this link to download the colour file that I created http://forum.brillkids.com/downloads/?sa=view;id=6189 I think it’s quite good as you can learn both the colour and the spelling at the same time.
Other than that, try to make learning colour in a song as kids learn best when they do enjoy it. In the shichida class, the teacher sing the ROY G BIV (treat as a name) songs and that’s how my girl learn the colours of the rainbow in the right sequence.
R- Red
O - Orang
Y - Yellow
G - Green
B - Blue
I - Indigo
V - Violet
Try to be creative and your kids will be have lots of fun while learning!
I am having the same diffiulty as you were. Eventually, my kid (now 2 years old) like to watch youtube and she learned her ABCs and Numbers from it. Since youtube has it all (but you need to select the video a little bit), i recommended that you use youtube…with the music and good illustrations, she will pick it up in no time.
So far, she learned(speaking and recognising) all the name of the colour but seem a little bit difficult in recognising it in reality…i guess because of the colour is abstract…
hi,
my 25 month old active boy just learned his colors. We bought the stackable rings and started playing with them and rolling around on the ground and then asking him to go get “the blue one” or “the red” one. we only had 4 diffrent colors so it made it easyer. after he learned those he got the rest of his colors and can now read the colors. hope this helps.
Ooops I left out something, I even used colour play dough to let her learn the colours. Now she already knew what is primary colours (yellow, blue and red) and what is secondary colours (green, purple and orange). She can even tell you their combination such as yellow + blue is green - as I had let her mix the yellow and blue dough together and see what the colours turn out by letting her trying out on her own (this will really enhance her memory - you learn when you do it on your own). I tried them using water colour too =) ! Have fun!
Zoe, your daughter is exactly like mine.
To the point that she can do her puzzles fine on her own but will put all the wrong pieces in when I’m next to her.
I have had many people tell me that she picks the right colour when prompted and identifies them, yet when she’s with me, eveything is blue! or she would count with them when she was younger, but never did with me.
The list goes on: does not sight read and the occasional time she did it, it litterally came out of her mouth in a split second.
I only know she knows her letters when I catch her on the fridge pointing at them and pronuncing them…
So i just keep talking to her, reading books, occasionally LR and flashcards (and I need to chose the perfect timing) and there’s obviously no questioning anymore such as: Where is…? What’s this…? Can you pick …?
because she absolutely resent this!
PS: Your daughter knows all her colors, trust me, she’s known them for a long time!
what is it about ‘blue’ anyway!!! A few people have said their babies have called all colours blue!
I stopped trying to test her as well. And like you, we only do LR when I know she’s in the mood and once she starts fidgetting, i turn it off. She really loves watchingher DVDs though, so most of our teaching is from dvds. She loves reading, as well, so that’s all we do now.
she really loves the LR book, and when I say yellow sun, she replies blue sky.
I guess some babies like to surprise you. I know she’s a really smart angel though. I recently put up some number print outs on her wall with tape, some of the numbers had turned upside down, I caught her putting them the right way up. She, as far as I know can’t identify any numbers yet. She does count to ten, ocaasionally missing out one or two numbers, but I was amazed she knew which way up the numbers were. Maybe she can actually identify them, I don’t know! I decided not to push it, I was tempted to turn them upsde down again and start to ask her ‘what number is this?’ but I restrained myself. I think I should just focus on her enjoying learning and take the pressure off her and especially myself!
My daughter learned colors and shapes from the Brainy Baby Colors and Shapes DVD in about a couple weeks, around 16 months old. I’d totally recommend it! I was always telling her what colors things were, but it was the dvd that did the trick!
