[mommyto2guatboys]

I need some help. My son will be turning 4 next week and we have been trying to teach him his colors for the last year and a half, he just doesn't seem to get it. We can ask him what color is your shirt, he will look quick, then look away, he will say "um green?" and I'll say nope, this is green try again, "um blue?" sometimes he can go through 3 or 4 colors before he gets it right, it's like sometimes he gets it and other times he has no clue. I can't tell if those times he seems to get it is when he just guesses right the first time. For awhile I thought he was color blind but he can sort things by color and once you show him that his shirt is blue you can ask him to find other things that are the same color and he can do it. I have always thought he had a lot of trouble learning colors, he also seems to learn other academic ideas slowly but is a pretty socially smart child with a big vocab.
I am asking this to the group because today his preschool teacher came up to me and said we needed to work with him on his colors. I kind of chuckled and said, "oh man I was banking on him learning them from you, I can't get anywhere with him on colors!!" The teacher said all of the same things that we thought, she thought he was color blind at first but no, then she said he had her fooled with his guessing for the first few weeks but now she doesn't know why he isn't grasping it. So my question is, is this normal? I have been concerned for a bit but i get the normal response that he is still young, but now that his teacher has noticed it I feel it could be a real problem. One other thing, when asked a question about for examply, what is the dog in the picture doing? or what person is holding the baby in the picture, he will answer with an "umm, umm, ah ah, and usually we get no answer or something really off the wall." does anyone think this could be a learning disability or nothing to worry about? My oldest who is 4.5 is really quick to learn things, I know not to compare them, but they are on oppositie ends of the learning spectrum.

Any help, suggestions, ideas would be great.

Magen
My family!

[jeck]

We have the same issue sort of. DS is 3 and he does the guessing thing and I asked our Eye dr about when we had his eyes checked this summer and she said her son did the same thing till he was almost 5. She said that most boys are too busy focusing on playing that they could care less about colors. I read an article somewhere that boys sometimes take longer to learn their colors than girls because they focus more on jumping, running and those types of things.

I really think DS has known some of his colors for a while and I catch him 'knowing' the right color at different times... But if I try to press the color issue he just starts guessing again. For now I am not worried about it and I don't ask him about colors as much. I try to introduce colors as we talk about day to day things. See the green grass, the red apple and so forth.

Good Luck and sorry I didn't really give you any advice. Just wanted you to know you are not alone.

[Slatond10]

Might not be totally a "boy thing" as my DD does this. She is very physical and very social but seems a little slow to learn some concepts and "colors" was definitely one of them. She is smart and can recite all the books of the bibles and say the "Lords prayer" @ meal time. She is 4.5 now and does appear to know her colors finally but still might get one totally wrong occasionally just for my reaction I think :-(

She is that personality that the more I push the more she resist to learn! So the only way I can "teach" is to find what interest her and use it. For example, she loves M&M's... so I would give her one if she could name the color correctly. Right now we are working on word recognition. If I try to do the flash cards she will freeze on me, but if I get a book and we read together with her saying the words from her word recognition cards then she can do almost all of them.

Kind of scares me that school will always be a struggle when I know she is smart! I will be watching this thread for other's input.

[mommytoEli]

Frog Street Press, Inc. - Product Detail

i highly reccommend this cd. i liked it bc i could play it in the car when the kids really had nothing better to do than listen. lol. the red song says
r-e-d red r-e-d red
i can spell red
i can spell red
firetrucks are red
stop signs are red too
r-e-d r-e-d

all the colors are similar- says the color, spells the color, lists things of that color. i liked it bc they were things eli knew- stop signs, grasshoppers, the sky, etc, and so when he saw those things he could say "hey, there's a stop sign, it is red." and i think it helped drive home the colors for him. just what worked for us.

[dianneemily]

My dd, Katy seemed to "learn things on her own time schedule". Seemed the harder I tried to help her learn something, the more she struggled or resisted (not sure which one). I'm not sure what the typical age is when a child learns colors. Both of my girls knew their colors before age 4, though.
I'm not sure if this is an indication of other problems, or just something he is not interested in - hard to tell. The best luck I ever had talking to Katy about colors was when we were walking by a row of parked cars. I would say, "is this our car? Nooooo, that car is RED. Is this our car? Noooo, that car is blue, etc" It started as a game to pass the time while we walked to our car one day, but she loved it and she started noticing colors.

[2xaround]

Have you tried using "the color of the day" method? Monday could be red and everyone wears red, color pictures using the red crayon, serve something red with meals, etc. The next day do a different color, third day yet another color, etc. Repeat as necessary.

[SKL]

My DD1 used to look away and act completely uninterested whenever there was anything remotely academic being discussed in books. However, out of the blue, she would accurately point out things like "circle" before she was 2. For a long time I figured she just didn't like to be told what to pay attention to.

I started to wonder about her eyesight when she started asking me to hold pictures very close to her so she could "see it." Turns out she is pretty nearsighted. She got glasses about a month ago and now she is a lot more likely to at least look at what I'm teaching about, though she still looks away often too. DD2 (similar age) is pretty advanced so I think DD1 may be thinking she is "behind" already, and wants to avoid that thought. Or maybe I'm over-thinking the whole thing. Either way, she has some catching up to do, so I just work with her whenever I can, especially with media that aren't purely visual (e.g., 3-d letters, songs), to which she responds better. (She knows her colors but can't seem to remember more than a handful of letters/numbers at this point. She'll be 3 soon.)

One thing about color-blindness (which is not that uncommon in boys) is that they can still tell the difference between some colors, so they may confuse you about this for a while. Maybe there are some tests to find out for sure.

Another thought is to see if he's having trouble making the idea-word connection versus recognizing the colors. Maybe if you ask him to give you the green block, versus asking him what color the block is, the result might be different?

Good luck!

[peregrinerose]

First, get his eyes checked. So much of learning is vision, and for some reason it's the one facet of health care that gets very neglected. Unfortunately vision issues not picked up early can lead to permanent vision loss.

Most good eye docs do color vision testing as a part of every new patient eye exam. Before getting worked up over the color thing, find out what he can or can't see. One out of eight males has red green color discrimination issues to varying degrees. Color blindness does not mean 'sees in black and white'... that's achromatopsia which also causes legal blindness due to total lack of cones. Color deficiencies are far more common, due to quirks in one or more of the three cone systems of the eye. Even boys with 'normal' color vision do not perceive shades of color as well as women do.

People with color deficiences do see color, in a way that is completely normal to them, they just don't perceive it the same way that you do :-) They can often match colors, but may have trouble with blue/purple or blue/green, or various other discrimination tasks.

[RomGuatMom]

I agree, get his eyes checked, BUT go to a doctor who can do a developmental vision exam. NOT all eye doctors do them but you will be amazed at the difference in the exam. My daughter has perfect visual acuity but lots of issues uncovered when a developmental exam was done. Ask your doctor if he/she does them and if not ask if he knows a doctor that does.

[mommyto2guatboys]

thanks for everyones replys, I will definatly get his eyes checked. I guess I have always thouht his vision was fine, but i will call and talk with our pediatric eye doctor and see what she thinks and what she will test for. I know she does a great amount of tests, we are not new to the glasses world as our oldest has had glasses since he was 3 and is very nearsighted. Hopefully if the eyes check out good that he is just not interested like others say, but that is hard because I thought for sure as much as he loves to please and loves preschool that he would learn them in a heartbeat!!

thanks,
Magen

[robandjulie]

I agree with SKL that there are different levels of "knowing colors". One is identifying that there are distinct colors which can help distinguish objects (i.e. sorting). Another level of learning the names is a receptive type language and then is the descriptive communicative type of understanding. It sounds like he has sorting figured out, but can he do the more receptive version? If you ask him to find the red ball or the green block can he do that consistently? I'd start there. Like others have said, just naming things as you walk around: that's a RED car, the grass is so GREEN..etc. From there more associations: That's a Blue car...just like the sky, the sky is blue. So is your shirt. what else is blue? Maybe have a game to gather up as many blue things in the house as you can in 10 minutes or something. Take a picture of him with all this blue stuff and print it out, put it on a page with blue stamps/stickers/coloring...etc. When offering things ask if he wants the RED apple or a YELLOW banana; or if he wants to wear the BLUE shirt or the ORANGE shirt, etc. Identifying colors requires two levels of thinking: recognizing the color and sorting through all the possible words/colors that may be correct to describe it.

Just some thoughts. A younger brother was slow on grasping colors and I remember doing similar activities with him.

[KJones5]

I don't know if this helps or not but I read your post and reread your post.... You have described my second son.

I share your concerns. I've not yet found an answer either.

Thanks for posting this as I've realized it's not just me with this problem.

[ej-momtobe]

Asking DS about colors never worked for him. We thought for a while that he did not know his colors when he actually did know them. try setting several different color cups upside down and put a cookie under 1. Tell him he has 1 chance to get the cookie, and it is under the green cup. See if he knows which one it is. They try again with different colors.

[SKL]

I just remembered something. DD1's knowledge of colors seemed iffy / inconsistent before she had her glasses. Most of the time she knew, but sometimes she would give some answer that was not even close.

DD2 used to talk about the changing traffic lights, but DD1 never did.

Then the day she got her glasses, at the very first traffic light she saw, she exclaimed "I see red, yellow, and green!" So that was an eye opener for me. She knew her colors just fine, but she could not distinguish them at any kind of distance, because her world was too fuzzy.

I should have known better, having had a prescription similar to hers before my laser surgery (I could only see clearly for about five inches in front of my eyes). But I didn't remember anything specific about poor color discrimination. (My eyes weren't that bad when I was learning my colors.)

[arthymom]

Dd is three so I am not worried yet. We have the same issue. My ds knew colors at 2 and had memorized an entire book at 18 months, so it's hard not to compare. On the other hand, dd shows street smarts and great common sense. Ds (6) and dd (3) were trapped in one of those kiddie mazes and she led him out.

Intelligence and memory are so different; so many variations.

I have also heard that there is great variation in when kids memorize colors....

Take care,