Leo is at the age where he's a little sponge. He loves reading, learning, and mostly playing parrot to all the words we say. What I love most about this age is their eagerness to learn and their ability to understand and take direction at a young age. I love being a mom for a million reasons but I think one of my favorite reasons is I love teaching him. From teaching him about bugs (mostly not to eat or kill them and their names) to teaching him his colors it brings so much joy to my heart watching him learn. A few weeks ago I decided it was time to tackle colors. So here is a post about a few things that worked for us!
We have been trying to introduce colors when we were playing with chalk and color crayons but he wasn't seeming to grasp it as easy. I saw these mess free finger painting that seemed to need a little more supervision as well as less color choices and I thought they might be a great way to introduce color. We started by playing with them outside and re enforcing the colors. PS Mom's this is a great mess free way for your kids to finger paint.
The finger painting way was a start but he still needed more guidance. I made him his familiar face book and it was amazing how quickly be picked up on people's names and he loved flipping through the book. So we happened to be at Home Depot and while waiting for paint to get mixed I grabbed a bunch of paint swatches. We started naming the colors while he was sitting in the shopping cart. I decided to take all the swatches home and glue them onto a poster board. Talk about a cheap way to teach colors. This really took his learning to the next level as he loved pointing out and saying the colors. I think he is a visual learner like myself so seeing the colors on the board vs painting with them was a lot easier. I made this board about 2 weeks ago and he can say all of his colors and point to them except orange. He can't seem to be a be able to say "Orange".
Lastly the way we have continued to reenforce colors is with colored toys. Leo loves cars so I thought this would be the perfect way to learn colors. I also will use them when we start counting. Right now we only can count to 3 and most of the time he stops after 2. But hey it is a start. I'd love to hear how you teach your little ones. I am NOT a teacher and have taken no education classes. I however have realized that Leo's learning style is very visual.... maybe all kids learning styles are visual at first.... but because of that I've tried to adapt my teaching style to that. What I'm always learning is that he learns the MOST through play. Sitting him down in a chair just doesn't work at this age, but while we are outside playing with chalk we are constantly talking about colors, shapes, numbers, all the while I draw about a million cars and planes. Lately he's been throwing me off and asking him to draw him cows. My cow drawings are pretty laughable but he loves pointing out the different parts on the cow. I think as a first time Mom I am just amazed how eager they are to learn at such a young age and how excited he gets about it.
Here are a few other color based toys that would be great for learning. We love all of the Melissa and Doug wooden toys. We asked for books and wooden toys for Leo's first birthday and we got a ton of Melissa and Doug stuff. They are the BEST! Like I said I"m not a teacher and maybe I'm doing this all wrong but it seems to be working for our family and I thought I'd give you a few tools that are working for us.
Cheers,
Jess
Jess
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