All the talk and coverage about politics and Brexit this last few of months has led us to some interesting conversations with our children recently. After going round in complicated circles, we found that the most concrete way of distinguishing between the Parties was to refer to them by ‘colour’. This made the explanations SO much clearer!
This got us talking about our colour matching and sorting sessions that we do at Talking Tots.
Pre-school children enjoy sorting things by colour, shape, and size. It helps them try and make sense of the world around them. It helps them to realise that life doesn’t tend to be random.
For example, they naturally sort their cars or crayons by colour ; their building blocks by size etc ….
Learning of vocabulary is organized and words are learnt in an ordered way. So a very young child may learn the word “ball” and that word may them be put away carefully in their mind with other ‘toy’ words, such as ‘teddy’.
As their vocabulary expands and they begin to label colours, they then have an added layer. So suddenly the red ball isn’t just neatly sitting with the “toy” library section in their minds … it’s also sitting in the “colour” library area of their brain. Vocabulary development really is fascinating stuff (well in our opinion!).
Anyway – Toddlers are usually able to match & sort colours before they can label them. Here are some of our ideas for great matching & sorting games to help your child’s speech & language development:
· Even with quite young children you can match & sort like colours. Start off with like objects and just a couple of different colours and then move on to several different colour. Building blocks are ideal for this.
· For early sorting use real objects – so if you have a well -stocked fridge, you might sort things to eat, in to their colour groups
· You can teach toddlers to identify colours and shapes by cutting out different colour shapes from paper. Make 2 sets, give your child the same shape/colours that you have and hold up a shape/colour and ask him to find the same one. You can then reverse role. Sounds simple but they just love it!
· Use different coloured plates to sort small coloured items from around the home into same colours
· Read books together. Identify objects in the book which have the same colour and you can then point to other things in the room which have the same colour
These are just a few of our ideas … but why stop at sorting colours? Children love to sort by shape, size, category and more… but that’s a whole new blog post.
At Talking Tots we have lots of fabulous and fun sorting games that children just love! Visit Talking Tots to find a class near you.
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