Learning Colors - Sterling,VA

I went through the same thing with my 3 year old. What my childs daycare suggested (and worked really well), was to pick one color, example: red.....dress that child in red, point out red things, fire truck, etc. Stick with one color for a day or so and then move to another color. The big thing was repeating that ONE color for a day or so and not introduce any new colors. It worked for my daughter. Good luck! I've boys do tend to develop later than girls so maybe he just isnt ready. Good luck!!

My older son was over 3 years old before he could get the colors. I thought he was color blind too, but he just had difficulty placing colors. He finally got them. My younger son picked them up early. Each child learns a bit differently.

Give him some time. He sounds like he's been busy learning all the other things you mentioned.

Three year olds are so hard to figure out, because sometimes they KNOW plenty and just don't want to cooperate! Kids can learn colors anytime over a variation of ages, so he may just be late on this. Or he is playing a game and not being serious with this.

However, he is certainly old enough to be evaluated. I believe every kid should visit an ophamologist at least occasionally to determine eye health. Maybe now is a good time for that? My kids started going at 1 and 2 years old respectively.

I don't know much about colorblindedness, but I do know it usually is not ALL colors. For instance, I think a very common occurance is that peopel (usually men) can't differentiate between red and green. Do a little research about the kinds of colorblindedness there are (google!) and then "test" him a bit to see if you noticve those in particulat. Don't just ask him to name colors, but ask im to distinguish. Show him two shirts or blocks or crayons and say "Give me the red one."

Try not to worry, but ask for a professional's opinion. Good news is, lots of men are color blind (and some women) and they adapt (they don't know any different.

It's wonderful that he has started to learn to count as well as know his ABCs. However, at his age he does not need to learn all of this. Relax, the colors will come. Can he match colors (put all red things together)? Just enjoy him and let his imagination and creativity develop during play. He will learn all of the "academics" as he gets older.

You're clearly a great mom who really wants what is best for your son, kudos to you for being so concerned about his well being. WOW you're in a hurry to get your son on the road of education. First off the color blindness thing is not something you need to be concerned about, at his developmental age it is VERY common to get colors mixed up, it it NOT a sign of color blindness. Second, you should really look into what school your son will be going to when he enters kindergarten and see what things your son should know when he enters. For most all public schools they prefer that every child know their alphabet, numbers to 10, colors and shapes and how to write their name. That's it. There are always several kids in each class that don't even know that, esp. if you live in an area with a lot of immigrants since they have to learn the language as well, if they know any more than that they can be sitting around in class bored out of their minds and ruining their experience of school. School should be fun and exciting and a challenge. The most important things you can be teaching your son right now are social and emotional skills, only you can teach him how to deal with frustration, dissapointment, bullies, etc. and right now is the best time to start those building blocks. Also, a recent study that was conducted for well over 10 years has shown that teaching our children academics earlier than kindergarten doesn't help them acedemically or in any other way in the long run but teaching them HOW to learn and those important social and emotional skills is something that will help them their whole lives. Again, you're clearly a great mom, just do what you think is best and he'll turn out just fine.

My boys are grown but I do have one that is color blind and it is very common in males. He did learn his colors as the way he explained color blindness to me is he can see differences in colors but he is not seeing the colors the way we see them.
I wouldn't worry about it as if he is color blind there is nothing you can do about it. He will learn his colors when he is ready.

I wouldn't worry about it, children learn at their own pace. I have kids at age 1 1/2 know their colors and some not until 3 almost 4. But they do get it.

One game I love to do is to go to Home Depot/Lowes and get paint swatches. They come in all colors and you can get the fun Mickey ones or Dora or other characters and then play matching games or sorting games or rainbow games. Lots of fun and a quick simple way to get wonderful colors!

Good Luck

find out which colors he is getting mixed up. is it all of them just the red and green or what. then find out which colors color blind people cant see. i know one is red and green they cant differenciate between. then go from there.

Hi A.,
I have a 22 month old boy. He counts to 10, knows all his shapes, can recite his alphabet (he recognizes a couple of letters and numbers) but interestingly he is also slower with colors. He has just started to get them right since he likes his crayons.

As with everything else kids learn at different rates and I think they learn the things they enjoy more quickly. His vision might be perfectly normal and he may not be too excited about colors. He's still so young.

If you're concerned about color blindness bring it up at your next pediatrician appointment. Red-green color blindness is one of the most common forms, most often in boys (rarely in girls). Does he mix up red and green (they look the same to people with this form of blindness)? If he does have this it would have come from your side of the family. Are any of the males in your family color blind? Don't stress out too much about it, if he is color blind he will live a pretty normal life. A brother of someone I know did not realize he was color blind till he was in his forties.

Hope this helps!

I have not read the other responses that u have recieved. However, I have a 3 yr old son, who we are also working on colors. He can do his ABC's, count, all that good stuff, but colors have always been a weak point. If we sit him down and try to do his colors, then he is totally lost. We bought, well my mother bought, Candy Land, that uses colors and he loves playing it and does really well most of the time. He does best when we catch him off gaurd. Like if we ask what color a certain car is, or ask what color the object that catches his eye. So I wouldn't worry b/c I don't. They will catch on eventually.

Definitely bring up this issue with your pediatrician. I think they can do simple test to check for color blindness. One thing you might try, is pointing out the WRONG color to him and see if he corrects you. Sometimes when my 3 1/2 yr old knows something it's tough to get the right answer to actually come out of his mouth. If I pretend that I don't know then he is quick to share his knowledge and correct me.

Take care.

if the only thing the child is having problems with is
learning his colors then you are way ahead of things! it is
highly possible that the child is color blind, david dachovny is and he is, for lack of a better term, yummy. now, you could spend thousands of dollars, going from expert to expert only to have an empty wallet and finally have a doctor verify that the child is color blind. or, you could do some family research and see if there are verified cases of male color blindness in your family or the childs fathers family, there are different types of color blindness but it is only passed through the male line. start with your father and the babies father, the answer may be closer than you think
K. H.

i had the same concerns with my daughter. one thing i did was put a pile of blocks together to sort by color. she could do that which is good enough for that age. but she just wasn't interested she wanted to sort them by shape. you could also do red light/green light while driving. my daughter would always mix up red and green. it came with time and like your son it seemed like she learned everything in the world first. i wouldn't worry.

It sounds like your son knows a lot! I wouldnt be concerned about the colors. My son was also like this and at the time I was concerned. At 4.5 he now knows his colors. He just didnt care. What helped us is that I would begin using color descriptives more (e.g. "look at that black cat", "you have the yellow car", "Lets wear our brown shoes", etc). Good luck!

If i was you i would look into color blindness. I have a newphew who presented the same way. We couldn't figure it out. He was doing well in every other way but just couldn't get his colors right. We figured out later that the reason was because he couldn't see blue or green. This can confuse them since you are saying this is blue and this is green and they see very little difference. They are both just slightly difference shades of gray. I would have him checked out. We didn't know of anyone who was color blind in the family so it was a shock. Also more boys are color blind than girls. good luck

He can be checked very easily for color blindness. I say check it out. But if that's not it, I wouldn't worry about it. He sounds like he's doing very well with everything else. He'll get it.

Hi A.,

My son was also a little over 3yrs old when he was able to name the colors. What helped him alot was I purchased a Leap Frog 1st Computer and one of the games would show him a colored ball and he had to burst that particular color. We also worked with naming the various colors After a few weeks he had his colors down. I wouldn't worry, because like one of the other mothers said every child is different and learns at his/her own pace. Sometimes that hard to accept I know, but it is true.

My son is almost 2.5 and when I ask he almost always says the wrong color first. However, when I ask again or tell him to look more closely he can usually tell me the correct color. I would not neccessarily worry at this point that he has not gotten his colors. Some skills just come easier to some kids than others. So where your son may be very advanced in some areas recognizing the differences in colors may just not be important to him.

That being said color blindness whether partial or full is fairly common in males. The test for color blindness is really simple and completely non invasive. It simply involves your son looking at at blob of colors and telling what picture he sees there. Some pediatricians can administer it and others would send you to a specialist.

My son learned his colors in preschool when he was 2. He's 4 now and still gets them mixed up. I would just keep up the repetition with him, and he'll get them on his own eventually. It might help to talk about the colors of some of his toys, or his clothes. I know we would say things like "Wow, we really love that green shirt you're wearing today!" It helped him get used to the different colors, and it was easier I think to focus on one color at a time. We'd ask "What other things can you see that are green like your shirt?" And we'd do the same with blocks-focusing on one color at a time. He does pretty well with most, but like I said still gets confused sometimes.

Good luck!
J.

Hi A. -
I had the same struggles with my first child. He is now 10 years old and we know he is officially color-blind. Early on I knew something wasn't exactly right because he learned everything else so quickly. I noticed that he knew his colors individually but when a bunch of crayons were thrown in front of him, he couldn't pick out one color. My other two children knew their colors right away. In fact, my 2 year old even knows the less familiar colors - pink, purple, gray, etc. (But he doesn't know his ABC's yet!!) My father and husband are color-blind so I know it is not a big deal. My father couldn't be a pilot during the Korean War because of it but was a fireman for 27 years before retiring and becoming an arson investigator. My husband can't be a policeman which bummed him out but was an Airborne Ranger, has served an Iraq, is an electrician and doesn't seem to be bothered by it otherwise.

You can go online and look up the color-blind test. See if your son can see the number or shape in the dotted circle. It isn't 100% but it will give you an idea if something isn't exactly right. If he can see the figure mixed in (even if he can't tell you what the shape is exactly or the number) he probably isn't color-blind and just hasn't learned them yet. Your son seems very smart and will learn when he is ready.
Hope this helps.

Good luck and God bless.

We had the same problem with barnyard animals. My son could name all his colors, count to 10, knew his body parts and articles of clothing, but for some reason no matter how many times we went over the animals and their sounds he just couldn't get them. The local Infants and Toddlers program made a big deal out of it, but both his teachers and his pediatrician said not to worry about it. They chalked it up to him being impulsive (sometimes we have to make sure he is listening to what we are asking before he rushes to answer) and that he probably just didn't care much about animals at that time as much as he cared about other things. If he is doing well with everything else, I wouldn't worry about it. Maybe he is just more interested in learning other things at the moment. They are absorbing so much, just keep going over it and eventually he will get it. What I think helped learn his colors though is whenever we would talk about things, we would always add the color to it. That's a red car, a yellow banana, etc. There is also a Blue's Clues video that he loves that goes over colors.

Hi A.,

I wondered if my son was color blind too! Turns out, he's not. I was frustrated that despite how much we tried, he was not "getting it". I began teaching him around 2. I'd use color words in my daily talk. Example: "It's time for breakfast, let's get the yellow box of Cheerios." "Today you're going to wear this blue baseball shirt." We also worked on puzzles and read books with color words. He'd repeat what I said, but when I "quizzed" him, he was rarely correct. Around 2 years, 2 months, we began potty training. Every time he was successful he got some M&Ms. Since they are all different colors, that was a great tool to practice with... let's put all the green ones in a pile... now all the red, blue, etc. He was able to correctly put the colors together (which made me believe that he could distinguish the colors, but did not recall the names). Then one day, my husband had about 10 M&Ms in a little bowl. He told our son to pick a certain color "Pick the yellow one." And to my amazement, he was correct every single time. I then realized that he knew his colors, but did not master them! So, from then on I'd give him the name (much easier than having him try to recall a color word). So, I'd say "Please go find a toy that is blue." And to my surprise, he'd normally come back with the correct one. However, if I tried to do it backwards, where I'd get a toy and ask him the color... he hardly ever knew the name. So, start with that. Give him the color word. Keep practicing in fun ways. Use color words in your daily language. Before you know it, he'll be learning them!!

Hope this helps.