In my last post, I talked about some of the ways we encourage Frida to learn about and explore colour. I mentioned I wanted to make Frida some DIY Montessori colour tablets to further explore the concepts of “darker/darkest” and “lighter/lightest”.
I decided to just start with one colour. I picked blue as it’s consistently been one of Frida’s favourites. I also decided to stick to four shades rather than seven, as she is only 19 months and I thought seven might be a bit overwhelming.
Making the tablets was really easy – I mixed three lighter shades of blue paint (and kept one as it was straight from the tube) and painted some colour patches on card. When dry, I cut some out to mount on rectangular white cards, and then laminated them. There is a more variation to the two darker shades in real life than is shown in my photos.
I wasn’t really sure how to present these to Frida, and decided to keep them in a dark blue wooden bowl (part of her Grimms nesting bowls set).
I demonstrated lining these up to Frida, using the words darker and lighter, darkest and lightest. I then asked her to pick which one was the darkest, then the next one, then the next one. We repeated the exercise with lightest. She surprised me by getting it straight away and picking correctly each time.
She was not very interested in lining them up, but seemed to like putting them back into the bowl in order darkest > lightest.
I managed to take a very short video of Frida working with her tablets – see below.
I am now thinking I will make similar sets of four with some other colours to see how she gets on, then in the future I will make some sets of seven shades for her to work with.
How do you encourage colour learning? What are your children’s favourite materials?
