Playing the Color Game

I plan to write extensively on this blog about the amazing range and depth of traditional Montessori materials.  Today, I am going to share with you how our family has used the Color Box 2 tablets in our home setting.  When my little one was just turning two he hadn't completely mastered all his colors.  While I wasn't overly concerned about this, at about that time in our lives I had received catalogs from some different companies that sell Montessori materials.  I decided to order the Color Box 2 from Alison's Montessori.  When it arrived, we came up with the Color Game as one way to use this material.  (NOTE:  In a traditional Montessori preschool classroom, a child, or children, would do a very similar version of this activity using 2 work rugs on the floor.) 

Here is a photo of the Color Box 2:

To start the Color Game, I remove one tablet of each color and place it in a little basket.

I take the matching color tablets and scatter them all over the floor in our computer room.

Then I sit with the empty wooden box in our adjacent living room and hold up a color, asking my little one to name the color.  He then takes his basket and the color tablet and goes off to find the matching tablet.  When he finds it, he brings me the pair and places them back in the wooden box.  We continue until all pairs have been matched.

Of course this simple game could be played without purchasing a set of Montessori color tablets.  I want to point out here, however, the reason these tablets are constructed and presented in this way (because Maria Montessori had a reason for everything she did).  If you think about how these tablets are made, the only attribute that distinguishes one tablet from another is color.  Maria Montessori felt it very important to isolate the concept that the material is designed to teach.  If she had made the color tablets look different from one another in any way other than that their color varied, the child could be distracted from the purpose of the material (i.e. discriminating and matching colors).  To many people, this may seem like breaking things down too much.  However, to me, a special education teacher who has worked with struggling learners for 17 years, the way that the isolation of a concept is embedded into the design of the material is genius.  I have seen over and over how confused children become when we throw too much at them at once.  The color tablets and their design are but one of many, many examples of the thought and care that went into each and every Montessori material.   And they are a beautiful representation of everything I love about Montessori!

Comments

[Em]

Hey - what a great game for your son! I need to do that at my house, my son will be two in a few weeks, and he gets many of his colors mixed up still. It doesn't help that he doesn't talk a whole lot either! I think I will implement this 'game' over the next few weeks and see if we can improve his color recognition. (he gets yellow and pink confused, and green is usually labeled as blue, although blue is always blue!) Maybe he's colorblind!?!

[Thimbleina]

Sorry just looked at your list of blogs down the side and you obviously have seen her blog (that'll teach me to read things before leaving comments - sorry!)

[Thimbleina]

Great idea I might try and make this perhaps using coloured card. I like your crayon rolls, I made one of these after seeing SouleMama's book (See my blog for details) she has some other great ideas if you haven't already seen her blog