Sensorial: Colour Matching

The general rule of thumb is that children are developmentally capable of grasping the concept of colour at around 18-months of age. That said; children are all different and learn uniquely, and so the most constructive approach is to introduce colours to your children whenever it comes up naturally their infancy.

At St Andrew’s Montessori we work with colour boxes as a way of teaching colour in stages; children are encouraged to focus on a few colours at a time and as they master the first colour box, they’ll move on to the second and finally the third.

The colour box lessons are basic in design and application so that children have the opportunity to become confident in their ability to identify colours. Once this is achieved, we will start to apply ‘extensions’ to the traditional colour box lessons in order to reinforce learnt principles.

A wonderful example of a colour box extension can be seen in the below tutorial by My Montessori Works:

The above lesson on colour matching is not only fun but an excellent opportunity for children to practice matching the colours they have learnt when using the colour boxes.

You may have noted that the lesson is applied without language at first, which suggests that children will likely be able to match objects of the same colour intuitively. Thereafter, the colours are named as the children engage in matching and lastly, the activity can be expanded into a ‘find objects to match with the appropriate colour’ from inside the classroom, or even your home (if you’d like to try colour matching with your child!).

If you’d like further information about this tutorial, feel free to contact us at info@saintandrewsmontessori.com. We’re happy to answer any questions.

Photo by Chris Barbalis on Unsplash