Monday 14 November 2011

TEACHING COLORS & NUMBERS TO PRESCHOOLERS

The activities which make preschool children learn both colors and numbers do not need too much time and preparation in real. Only a few basic items for these activities, like crayons, markers, coloring books intended for such learning and plain papers are required. Children learn through visual aid, by the process of repetition and hands-on practice. So, everyday you should spend a few minutes going over colors and numbers
Following items will be required for this project: an easy outline drawing book for children to color in, and red, black and green crayons. Make enough copies of the coloring page for each student. Number each individual section of the picture, alternating the numbers 1, 2 and 3. Do not use the same numbers in spaces that are next to each other. Assign a different number to each color. For instance 1 = red, 2 = green, and 3 = black. Now ask the children to use this number formula to color in the pictures.

With this activity you can teach children about the primary and secondary colors as well as numbers while counting the different colors of the rainbow. Showing a picture of rainbow, ask children to count how many colors the rainbow have. Give each child a large sheet of paper, a pack of crayons, or a pack of pencil colors. Assign all the colors of the rainbow a different number. For example 1 = red, 2 = orange, 3 = yellow, 4 = green, 5 = blue, 6 = Indigo, 7 = Violet. Now ask the children to paint each number in the color that it correlates with. Now you can describe them how the three primary colors make the secondary colors by mixing them.
Get a worksheet that has a theme by illustrating an animal or object, a number and a color. An example of this is "one red rabbit", “two black bulls”, “three green grasshoppers”, etc. Now in this worksheet first ask the children to color the rabbit in red color, the two bulls in black color, then the three grasshoppers in green color, and so on. This way the children will learn numbers and colors both by counting the objects for coloring and filling colors in them. Now you have taught your children 10 colors like red, green, blue, black, yellow, orange, white, grey, purple, and brown for 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 respectively; but children will get confused what color they will fill for 11 or 12. Because 11 has two one’s and similarly 12 have one 1 and one 2, so they can’t fill red and green both for one number. So tell them to fill pink for number 11, magenta for number 12 and violet for number 13 and so on. You need to get a little creative for some of the letter/number variations; nevertheless, through this children can learn about a wide variety of colors.

Flash cards are also a good mean to teach children about the numbers and colors. For this you need 20 flash cards, ten with the numbers on each of them 1 to 10 with different colors and another ten cards with objects 1 to 10 on them. Care should be taken that the color of the number and objects should be correlating. For example if your card which shows number 3 is written with green color, the card which have three objects on it should also be in green color. Now, shuffle the picture cards so that they are not in sequential order, then show each picture card to the children and ask them to tell you which number it goes with and what color it is. This way children will recognize the color and also learn the numbers.

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