TEACHING COLOURS TO THE CHILDREN

Colours are all around us but how can we make the preschoolers identify them? How can we make them understand whether it is red or yellow? Colours come to us naturally but the preschoolers have to be taught. It 's been a long time since we learnt to identify the colours, which makes this task much more complicated. Like everybody else these thoughts bothered me as well.
                         So initially when I started teaching her the colours i did not know how to proceed. I tried many methods but none of them seemed to be helping me. May be I was not clear about the strategy myself so I failed in my attempts. Then one day while watching her play with one of her toys an idea came to my mind. I decided to use her toys to teach her the colours and this idea worked for me. What I did was, I started playing with her and in between I would tell her about the colour of the toy. I started with the yellow colour and continued the routine for few days. Then I began asking her which colour it was? and when she was unable to tell I prompted the answer yellow. In the beginning she did not pay any attention to what I said but later i felt she was paying attention to what she was being told. I don't remember after how many days I got the answer from her but my patience paid. She had learnt to identify the yellow colour not only in her toys but everywhere else. Next I moved on to red colour. This time it did not take her long to learn as she was eager to learn herself. So following the same technique I taught her most of the colours.

                        In order to give her more practise we played all sorts of games in which she would identify the colours for me either on the TV screen or the board books.  At times we engaged ourselves in the activities like colouring the pictures or scribbling with the coloured pencils on the plain paper. We even made coloured pictures on the computer screen using the programme microsoft paint.
                      Parents can easily use these ideas to teach their children to recognise colours. Besides these a variety of teaching aids are available in the market like chart of colours, books, stencils with colouring pens, different coloured clay etc. You may use them to help your child learn about colours. An important advice : It becomes easier to teach the children if we join them in their games. This way teaching becomes fun and the child can easily learn without even realising it. But revision is necessory so that the infromation  given stays with them forever.