Teaching colours: what to do before the names

Colours are the first thing almost everyone teaches, and the thing most often taught by testing.

What colour is this? Asked once, it is a game. Asked four times in a row it is an exam, and a two-year-old who does not know the answer learns only that this is a conversation they lose.

Sorting comes a long way before naming

A child can put every red brick in one pile and every blue brick in another long before they can tell you which is which. That is the real skill. The words are a label stuck on top of it later.

So the useful sequence is: match, then sort, then name.

• Match is easiest. Hold up a red brick, ask for one the same. No vocabulary needed at all.
• Sort is next. Two piles, then three. Still no words.
• Name last, and it will mostly arrive by itself if the first two are solid.

The Department for Education groups colour work under expressive arts and design rather than under anything test-shaped, and that is a fair hint about how it is meant to feel.

Start with four, not eleven

Red, yellow, blue and green first. They are high contrast, they turn up everywhere, and four is a set a small child can hold in their head.

Add the rest as they come up in real life: orange, purple, pink, brown, black, white, grey. Our own colour activities run to nine colours, which is plenty, and there is no reason to meet them all in one week.

Keep the close pairs apart at the start. Blue and green together is a harder job than blue and red, in exactly the way b and d together is harder than b and s.

One thing worth ruling out

If a child keeps mixing up particular colours long after the others have clicked, and especially reds with greens or browns, it is worth considering that they may not be seeing them the same way you are.

Colour vision deficiency affects roughly 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women, it is usually inherited, and it is very often spotted at school rather than at home because everyone assumes the child is simply not learning.

This is not a reason to worry. It is a reason to mention it to your GP rather than to keep drilling. A child who cannot see the difference will not learn the difference, however patient you are.

Games without a worksheet

• Colour of the day. Pick one, then notice it out loud when you pass it. Not all day. Twice.
• Sort the washing. Darks and lights is a real job that is also a sorting task.
• Fruit bowl. Ask for the yellow one rather than the banana.
• Two bowls of bricks. Say nothing, start sorting, and wait. Most children join in without being asked.

The last one is the strongest, because nothing about it is a question.

Where an app fits

A screen has one genuine advantage here: its red is exactly the same red every time, and it says the word the same clear way on the twentieth go.

The real world does not work like that. A red apple, a red car and a red jumper are three different reds, and learning that they are all "red" is the part that actually matters. A screen cannot teach that, because it never shows an awkward in-between colour under a kitchen light.

Use both. The bricks are doing more work than the tablet is.

Our colour activities cover nine colours across trains, buses, fish and drawing, and everything is read aloud.