When will your toddler learn colors?

Your toddler may already have a favorite color and know some color words. But it may be another year or more before they can correctly name the color of an object every time. Learn why now is a good time to talk about colors—and easy ways to do it.

In this post:

• Article: The better way to help your toddler learn colors
• Activity: How to introduce color matching
• Ask & Learn: What are some fun matching games I can play with my toddler?

The better way to help your toddler learn colors

Learning colors can be a challenge for toddlers well into their preschool years. While they may know color words like “blue” and “red,” many 3-year-olds, and some 4-year-olds, confuse them, research shows.

According to a study from Stanford University, a small change in how we teach young children about colors may boost their understanding. Many parents will say, “Look at the green ball,” or “That’s a red apple.” However, reversing the order—“The ball is green” or “The apple is red”—significantly improved a toddler’s ability to identify colors. 

When do children learn colors?

Children begin to understand color when they’re about 1 year old, though they can’t identify different hues. That begins much later, typically a few months after a child turns 2. As mentioned above, mastering color identification can take years.

Making learning colors easier

As your toddler develops, so does their awareness of the concept of color as an object property, or attribute. You might scratch your head if your toddler points to a red balloon and says “blue,” but this is a big breakthrough. They’re starting to understand that objects have attributes—size, shape, texture, color—that distinguish them from other objects. ⁣

In the Stanford study of toddlers 24 to 30 months old, psychologists found that even after hours of repetitive training on color words in the traditional order—“This is a purple crayon”—the children’s performance didn’t improve. Our adult brains automatically sort adjectives and nouns, but a young child hasn’t yet learned to do that. So when they hear the phrase “purple crayon,” they may believe “purple” is an object.

As you speak, your child processes your words in order. So when you draw attention to the crayon before labeling it as purple, your toddler is better able to understand that “purple” refers to an attribute of the crayon and not the other way around. For the same reason, children may do better on color matching questions when you ask them, “Which one is blue?” rather than “Which is the blue one?”

How to introduce color matching

When introducing the Mosaic Button Board to your toddler, let them focus on putting buttons into the board and pulling them out at first. Once your child shows an interest in color, insert the simplest color-pattern card—with four colored squares—into the board. As they progress, increase the complexity with more challenging color patterns 🙂

What parents are asking our experts…

“What are some fun matching games I can play with my toddler?”

Answer:

You can support an early awareness of matching by pointing out things that match in your child’s environment and daily routines. 

• If your child is having a snack and you are having the same thing to eat, you can point that out: “Cracker, cracker. Same, same.”  
• When you sing a song like “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes” you can pause and point to your nose and your child’s nose, your knee and their knee, saying “Nose, nose” and “Knee, knee.” 
• You can also begin matching objects to pictures in other ways. If you’re reading “Bea Gets a Checkup”, and your toddler has a doctor kit, you can point to the real-life object and then the one in the book. Another idea is to try matching items to “The Things I See” Texture Cards.

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Learn about the research

Ramscar, M., Yarlett, D., Dye, M., Denny, K., & Thorpe, K. (2010). The effects of feature‐label‐order and their implications for symbolic learning. Cognitive science, 34(6), 909-957.