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Grab some objects around the house and make your very own rainbow! It's a great way for your toddler to learn about colours.
Encourage your child to arrange the objects in colour order of a rainbow, and ask them to describe what they are doing. Along the way, you can help them to describe the different objects and what they're used for too.
Have a watch of our video below if you need a little reminder of the order of the rainbow.
What are the benefits of the rainbow colour game?
- Building a rainbow from household objects helps children to learn words for colours.
- Picking different objects also develops their understand of naming words.
- Chatting to them about all the objects they've collected allows them to practise describing objects in different ways.
- Building their own rainbow gets children to think about how to order things.
- Using colours associated with physical objects supports children's understanding of what colour is.
How to play the rainbow game
With your child, gather together a number of differently coloured items from around the house. It could be their toys, fruits and vegetables, cups and bowls or anything safe really!
Encourage them to arrange the objects in the order of colours of the rainbow. You might need to prompt them. For example, you might ask them 'which is the red one?'.
There are seven colours in the rainbow: Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. You could sing the rainbow song with your toddler to help them learn about all the different colours.
When they pick up and name an item, encourage them to chat about each item. For example, you could ask 'what does the broccoli feel like?'.
Once they've mastered the colours, why not see if they can arrange the items in other ways.
Think of some ways you could challenge them to order the items - maybe they could sort them from biggest to smallest? Or maybe their favourite to their least favourite shapes?
Learning colours with 2 year olds
Children usually learn colour words between the ages of two and three. There's loads of fun ways to chat about colours and help your child understand them. Check out these fun activities:
- When you pair socks together you can talk about all the different colours.
- Playing the traffic light game links colours with instructions (and uses up lots of their energy).
- Finger painting is a fun and messy way to get your little one using lots of colour words.
Find out more about how toddlers learn colours and how to help them here.
