The benefits of colour play

Why do we focus on colours, shapes and patterns with little ones?

Look out of your window... What do you see? Could you describe the car driving past or the flowers growing in the garden without mentioning their colour or shape? Could you ask someone to pass you a particular object without describing these things?

Everyday life requires an understanding of colours and shapes. Children need to understand that the green traffic light means go and the red means stop. They need to be aware that turning on the blue tap means the water will come out cold but the red will come out hot. So colour is absolutely a vital concept to understand as part of everyday life.

Not only this, learning colours and shapes helps to broaden children's vocabulary. It opens them up to a world of descriptive vocabulary that they can use to explain what they want or need. Colours and shapes, as well as position and size, are the vocabulary we often use first when describing something verbally. For example if you say 'I've lost my necklace.' You are likely to be asked, 'What does it look like?' Shape and colour give you the language required to explain, 'It is my silver one with a round pendant and a little red gemstone'.

Exploring shape and colour through play activities also lends itself to sorting and grouping objects. Children tend to do this naturally and it is a vital life skill. Sorting, categorising and grouping at a young age provides strong foundations for future mathematical learning. Similar skills of comparing and contrasting are needed to solve mathematical problems when they are older, such as sorting into odd and even numbers or deciding whether a number is a square number or not. And it goes without saying that sorting and organising skills help children with tidying up!

Single colour play is proven to benefit children from a very young age. At first babies see black and white or high contrast items best, then red and yellow are great colours to introduce. Presenting babies with an object or selection of objects that are all the same colour helps them to see the item best. Younger babies will start to see an object in focus if it is all one colour and their coordination and grip will be improved as they can see the edges more clearly. Seeing a colour on the same colour background is more of a challenge but is good to practise as it helps to develop their visual discrimination.

Then of course there is always the fun of colour mixing. How exciting to discover that mixing 2 colours can make a different colour altogether. To young children that can be like magic! Mixing colours allows children to use scientific skills, making predictions, observations and experimenting with cause and effect. Again language is key here as children may create different shades of colour and use their vocabulary to describe their 'dark' or 'bright' green paint that they made by mixing blue and yellow.

So when children are exploring colourful toys or objects, organising them, talking about them or asking questions about what they see, they are constantly learning and making connections in their busy little brains. Giving them lots of opportunities to do so is not only fun, it is supporting their learning in so many areas.

Why not take a look at our colours and shapes flashcards in our Etsy store. These are great to add to a play environment to encourage sorting, grouping, identification of colour and shapes and to develop vocabulary. The pack contains colour mixing cards too.