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Look around the room you’re in. What do you see? A yellow wall, a soft white blanket, and maybe even a (dead) green plant. Chances are, your description included colors.
Colors are all around us and make up a huge part of our descriptive vocabulary. Identifying and using colors is one of the earlier language skills many preschoolers and young learners begin to develop.
But what happens when children struggle with learning and using color words? How do we effectively teach colors to preschool students who need more support?
The short answer is books, activities, sensory bins, and play. But instead of leaving it at that, I want to give you a more colorful answer. In this post, I’m sharing my favorite teaching colors activities that I use in speech therapy sessions and early learning environments to help young children learn and use color words with confidence.
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There are so many speech therapy color activities, and chances are you probably have a lot of the materials in your office already! Here are some basic activity ideas for you:
Many of these teaching colors activities work well for toddlers, preschoolers, and early elementary students, whether you’re teaching in a classroom, speech therapy session, or small group setting.
If you love using sensory bins in your preschool speech therapy sessions, teaching colors just got easier for you! You can use these color themed sensory bin materials and guides to adapt this bin to work on articulation, vocabulary, wh-questions, verbs, and more! When it comes to teaching colors activities, having some hands on, tactile options increases engagement in your sessions.
Go to any bookstore or children’s section, and you’ll quickly notice there are plenty of picture books about colors. While many of these books are great for read-alouds, it can take a little digging to find ones that work especially well for teaching colors in preschool, speech therapy, and early learning settings.
I’ve shared a full list of my favorite picture books about colors in a separate post, but I wanted to highlight a few go-to favorites here that pair especially well with play, crafts, games, and hands-on teaching colors activities
Play-based learning is one of the most effective ways to teach colors to young children. Play works especially well for the age range we typically target when teaching colors because it provides a meaningful and motivating context for learning. Through play, children naturally hear, use, and practice color words while interacting with materials they enjoy.
While colors can be embedded into almost any play-based activity, here are a few specific play ideas that work especially well for teaching colors in preschool and early learning settings.
Speech Ice Cream Stand is open for business with this ice cream pack! Be the customer and ask your students to make ice cream with different “flavors” (colors). Your students can also be the customers and ask for different flavors. Pretend to mess up their order and give them the wrong colors. Ask what you did wrong!
For a lot of our students, the word “game” is pretty much synonymous to speech therapy. For a lot of speech therapists, games are an easy way to work on different goals when working with groups or a fun way to get kids engaged in activities. Here are some fun games that involve colors:
The Stay at Home Educator has great task cards you could try to incorporate with your games.
There are a lot of fun rainbow speech therapy crafts you can do with your students. There are other arts and crafts ideas you can do to teach colors, too.
Colors are all around us, and we use these words to describe so many aspects of our lives! It’s no wonder we can make teaching colors so fun for our students. What activities, toys and games do you use when working on colors? Share with me in the comments or on social media!
