The other day my friend said, “I know you don’t like parents working on colors, but when SHOULD I work on colors. I know I need to some time.” I told her to follow her child’s lead.
I remembered when my daughter and I were getting out a bib for meal time. She always said, “Bib,” as we grabbed one out of the basket, but one day she said, “Blue bib.” I was so surprised. She was actually right.
Many times after that when she named a color, she was completely wrong, BUT she was beginning to show an interest in colors. Why did this happen at that particular time and all of the sudden? Because she was ready.
She was solidly at the two-word phrase level of development. That meant that she was ready to put a word in front of the word “bib”, which she already knew very well. She could begin to differentiate between the different bibs, and did so by color. There lies the crux of my waiting to focus on colors argument. Colors are adjectives. They modify nouns. Your child needs to know a variety of nouns and understand each noun and its properties well, before they can begin to focus on that noun’s attributes.
So, to sum it up. You can work on colors when your child is beginning to put words together to form phrases, but not before. AND you are always going to help your child fill pages and learn new concepts more easily if you focus on what your CHILD is interested in and motivated by naturally and intrinsically.
That’s when you can work on colors.
Do you think your child is ready to work on colors? How did he let you know he was interested?