6 Simple Tricks to Teach Your Toddler Colours and Shapes
Children are naturally curious beings. They go about the world soaking in different sights, sounds, and smells. They have their own ways and means of absorbing stimulus from the environment and remembering what they observed. Watching your child go about making a sense of the world can be a beautiful and thrilling experience. Why not partner with your child in simplifying this complex web of information they have to process?
The world is made up of shapes and colours. Help your child learn more about them using these simple ways:
- A Plateful of Colour
Give your children nutritious meals which are also made up of rich colours. Decorate a sandwich with olives for black eyes, a triangular piece of cheese for a yellow nose and a wedge of tomato for a mouth. Make healthy, raw vegetables a part of the daily meal plan and help your child learn veggie and fruit names along with the colour that they are. For example, instead of a tomato, say ‘red tomato’ and instead of radish say ‘white radish’. - Sorting
Engage your child in sorting activities. Give them a pile of clothes, a boxful of clothes pins, a packet full of crayons or anything else that comes in varied hues. Ask your child to sort objects by their colours. Aside from building an intuitive sense of separating out colours such activities, when performed with small objects, also help build motor skills. - Identify and Seek
Play this fun game with your child where you give commands to seek out objects represented by colours and shapes. ‘Get me something green’, ‘Fetch something round’ are the kind of simple instructions you can begin with. You can make your instructions more complicated as the game progresses by giving a combination. For example, ‘Get me something that is red and round’ and enjoy as your child rummages for a tomato in the fridge. - Build Basic Shapes
Use daily items like wool or ice-cream sticks to build shapes together with your child. Once you have built basic polygons ask your child to replicate them. Talk about the shapes and where they are visible in your environment. Point to a window that is square or a door that is a rectangle. Squeeze a party hat to make it into a triangle and open lids of jars to show them a circle. Identifying, recognising and reinforcing are the steps you need to follow to help children remember shapes. - Make Simple Shape and Colour Collages
You don’t need to buy expensive colouring books for your children – all this can be a DIY activity! Help your children draw shapes and assign a colour to each. Then by tearing off strips of the right colour from magazines and newspapers, paste the right colours in each shape. Now cut out these shapes and encourage your child to put these shapes together to build newer objects. For example, a circle atop a triangle makes an ice-cream cone! Or a triangle atop a rectangle makes a hut. Let creativity run amok! - Make Labels
Add labels of shapes to common objects at home. Don’t write down the shape-name – rather make little labels with shape icons and paste a rectangle on a door, a circle on a ball, a square on a window, etc. This will help build connections and correlations in your toddler’s brain.
For a child, the whole world is a laboratory. Enough opportunities for practical learning are hidden within our houses. Exploit them to build a sense of shapes and colours in your toddler and innovate play-time activities with objects you are surrounded with.