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Behaviour/development

Talk to others about child development and behaviour stages here. You can find more information on our development calendar.

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Original poster

When are kids able to start naming COLOURS???

72 replies

drosophila · 10/04/2007 19:04

Just wondering.

OP posts:

Are your children’s vaccines up to date?

Set a reminder

hana · 10/04/2007 21:22

so true about what you emphasize! Mum taught my daughter ( then age 2) to say the alphabet.....backwards........ it was just a song to her. but mum is like that , another thread altogether!

Mercy · 10/04/2007 21:22

ds is just 3 and I think he started naming colours correctly about 6 months ago.

But similar to Bozza's dd, he gets confused with blue and yellow sometimes.

FillyjonkIsMilitantAboutFruit · 10/04/2007 21:23

ds can't do it and he's 3 1/2

ds can, she's 21 months

TheArmadillo · 10/04/2007 21:25

hana my granny taught me the same thing at the same age.

I can still do it - when I was a kid it was my party trick.

Ds is 2.6. He can name quite a few colours, but is not always consistent.

hana · 10/04/2007 21:33

it was quite when dd age 2!! could do it but I couldn't!! have since practiced and is my party piece......( not really lol)

LandSmum · 10/04/2007 21:36

DD1 is 3 next week and has only recently been consistently getting them right - struggling a bit with yellow though. I have been encouraging her with thrm for a while but bit slow to get them right. With everything else developmentally she has been pretty quick. dd2 is almost 8 weeks and she knows them all. lol

mumto3girls · 10/04/2007 21:37

My dd3 can name lots of colours absolutely correctly since 19 months old ( I know cos it was Christmas when we noticed how many she could do)
Red, Blue, Yellow, Orange, Purple, Silver, Gold, Brown, Black, Grey and she can say things are shiney, sparkly or plain!!

FillyjonkIsMilitantAboutFruit · 10/04/2007 22:19

i got concerned re ds and this once

read a thread (can't remember if i searched or if it was current). someone, i think jimjams, pointed out that actuallym naming colours is not an especially useful skill compared to, say, being able to ask the way to the bathroom

i think of this often

mumto3girls · 10/04/2007 22:21

It's true..I'm sure colour naminm gis just a good memory rather than intelligence alone...although DD3 is extremely intellignt and could ask her way to a bathroom now too...

FillyjonkIsMilitantAboutFruit · 10/04/2007 22:24

lol

see i have an early colour namer and a non colour namer

but really-its something that is often fixed on and I do think it causes Worry and Anxiety and so on

colditz · 10/04/2007 22:25

Ds1 could do it as soon as he could actually say the words - but he has a speech delay, so who knows what was going on in his head before 2.5?

Gobbledigook · 10/04/2007 22:27

Ds3 is 2.7 and has the main ones sussed now.

He was hit and miss for about 8 or 9 months previous to that.

welliemum · 10/04/2007 22:35

dd1 (2.6) told me the ohter day that my hair was blue.

I'm not, that old, honest

I don't think colour naming is a predictor of future greatness tbh. Hope not anyway, or dd1's in trouble...

Original poster

drosophila · 10/04/2007 22:54

Funny the things you tend to emphasise. When DS was very young (about 18mths) he was given an inhaler for his asthma. You have to hold the spacer over his mouth for 10 breaths and he used to wriggle about so I would count very loudly to 10 and look him in the eye. It worked and he would breathe as required. As a consequence he could count to 10 at a very young age and now funnily enough loves maths at school.

OP posts:

cat64 · 10/04/2007 22:55

This reply has been deleted

Message withdrawn

Linnet · 10/04/2007 23:00

dd2 was able to name some colours before she 2, although when the HV came to do her check up she refused point blank to say any even though she knew them.

I remember when we were at the aquarium in St Andrews last summer there was a play area with a lego type of wall game and she pointed to all the coloured bricks and named them all, even the black and purple ones, I was impressed as I didn't think she knew those two.

A funny thing she does is refers to the bedrooms in my granny's house by colour. One is the purple room as it's painted purple, well lilac, and the other is the yellow room as it has a yellow duvet cover. Makes perfect sense but we call them by other names but she refuses and calls them by their colours.

welliemum · 10/04/2007 23:29

I agree, cat64, but it's an interesting question, because it's hard to tell what they can distinguish before they can tell you in words.

I also think it's interesting that colours are sorted differently in different languages, eg in some languages light blue and dark blue are different colours rather than shades of one colour.

Boco · 10/04/2007 23:31

My dd (2.3) can say all the colours, but gets them consistently wrong. She guesses wildly, but i can safely say she's never been right yet.

gess · 10/04/2007 23:55

ds3 says everything is red (he's 2.4), but he may be red-green colour blind, so I don't push it. He says really red things are red very enthisiastically so he may be getting it and refusing to expand vocab elsewhere.

Ds1 could repsond to "give me the green one" frmsomething like 12 months. He used to spend hours colour sorting balls. But he's severely autistic so no point paying any attention to in terms of normal development.

Gobbledigook · 11/04/2007 08:18

gess, until a couple of months ago my ds3 said everything was red too!! He's just 2.7 now! How spooky! In addition, it's possible any of my boys are colour blind (or should that be colour defective? my brother is always correcting me!) so I never got too hung up on learning colours - just followed them and watched how they did.

THe older 2 don't seem to have it and ds3 is pretty much bang on with his colours now too.

OrvilleRedenbacher · 11/04/2007 08:19

but a mates ds coudltn do it at 5
but he had issues

bozza · 11/04/2007 08:24

DD could match colours and insisted on wearing matching knickers and hair clips long before she could reliably name the different colours.

FillyjonkIsMilitantAboutFruit · 11/04/2007 08:48

am in many ways impressed that you all know this stuff

I must say, I can't remember when my kids did 90% of what they did

and colour naming would not really jump out at me as a sign of early giftedness, tbh, unlike say putting a bowl of food on ones head (ds did this very early...)

Gobbledigook · 11/04/2007 08:49

Filly, I can only remember ds3 because he's 2.7 so it's recent. NO idea about the other two!

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