Learning About Colours

Learning about colours (颜色)

This week we are learning about colours. You may say is easy to teach little ones about colours as there are colours everywhere. But what about other languages? English is commonly used among us in our country. When it comes to other languages, not so often. Hence, this week we are learning about colours in Mandarin Chinese.

We will be going through some fun and engaging colours activities for both toddlers and preschoolers. First, we started off with reading and saying the colours in Chinese with the colours flashcards.

Learning colours with little ones especially toddlers can be really fun but do bear in mind that most children are not able to differentiate between different colours until at least 18 months old.

We tried to match the Chinese words to their correct colours. They actually know the colours in Chinese but when it comes to word recognition, they do need a little work on that.

Ok, time for a “break” from Chinese words recognition. We had a little Chinese learning game on categorizing the items/objects to the right colour cards. They have to read out loud the colour and the object in Chinese. A little bit of a challenge for my girl as we have been speaking in English to her all the while and now she has to translate everything into Chinese for me ???? As you can guess, the way she speaks is total “out of tune”. We were laughing non-stop when she speaks in Chinese, including herself!

What’s next? Game time of course! I have painted an egg carton with colours and took out the poms poms and toy tongs for them to play with. They had loads of fun sorting out the colours while building and improving their motor skills on grasping.

The next game we have is sorting of mails to its correct colored mailboxes. We had a little role play here pretending to be a postman delivering mails to our little mailboxes. The kids had done a great job matching the colored mails to the correct colored mailboxes ????

Finally, we had a drawing and painting session. I gave the kids 2 colours: red and blue, and asked them what they want to draw with the 2 colours. My preschooler suggested a valentine heart and so we did an abstract heart art painting.

Can you spot how many hearts are there in the 2 paintings?

Objectives of today’s lesson:
– to learn colours in Chinese
– pronunciation of the words
– word recognition
– to speak and to listen
– motor skills
– sort and classify various colours
– experimenting with colours

Get your hand on our matchy mailboxes activity here: