An Eye for Color

We discovered earlier this month that Jonah does pretty well now in identifying the basic colors.  One night we were in the living room and Jonah was at his easel playing around with his crayons. (For a time, his favorite activity was to move the crayons - at that time part of a set of 48 - from the bin on the right to the bin on the left and then back again. After he tired of that activity, he discovered the fun in picking them out of the bins, going to the side of the easel, and dropping them over the support on the side of the easel - a great way to break crayons!)  One of us randomly asked Jonah to bring us a crayon of a particular color, and he did so successfully, which of course, caused us to continue to test his ability to bring us the correct color.  And he did remarkably well, when he stayed focused on the task at hand.  Here are a couple of videos from the early part of the month (I think he's gotten better in the time since then):






Overall, Jonah does remarkably well for his age (in my humble opinion) in pointing to the correct color when asked, though he does tire of the game at times and clearly starts guessing or just messing around, so we try not to quiz him too much.

While we were in Ohio, he enjoyed pointing to Grandma and Grandpa Gregg's Christmas tree, verbalizing the names of the different colors of lights and ornaments. At one point while at his cousins' house, he enjoyed naming the colors on Grant's chore chart, and he's started to randomly tell us colors out of the blue while we are in the midst of playing. More often than not, however, if we ask him to specifically tell us what color something is, he answers with "een" or "grnnn" (his attempt to say green). It seems that most of the time, he is more successful at stating the correct color when it is of his own prompting than when we initiate the "game." 

A book we discovered at the library last month and gave to Jonah for Christmas helps marry his current interest in colors with his love of trains: Freight Train by Donald Crews.

I find it amazing that my little guy - who just a year ago was figuring out how to sit on his own - can now identify colors!  Both frightening and amazing all at the same time!