Why is learning about shapes and colours important for early childhood learning?
Early childhood learning has never been more important as we progress further into a more technology enabled world. It is never too early to begin introducing children to core education like language and mathematics. But why is it important and beneficial for kids to learn about shapes? Shapes and colours are often introduced to very little ones early on for tactile and visual stimulation, indeed many early years toys are tactile and take the form of simple geometry shapes such as cubes, pyramids and spheres and with bright and varied colours. Children are very visual creatures. Before they can comprehend words and meanings, they see things and actions. They copy and repeat. They touch, taste and smell. They are inquisitive and experimental in nature.
In addition to these very early benefits, introducing shapes is also an easy way to promote motor skills, generate spatial awareness and begin the process of teaching about geometry in the form of three dimensional shapes. While your little wrigglers may not understand the words yet, it is also important to say what the shapes are and repeat this often; they understand words far earlier than they can speak them, and you never know when this is happening so just start immediately. Over time your child will remember the word and associate it with the shape. It is the same with colour. It is how we learned, although we don't remember it of course.
In addition to the above early developmental benefits, over time, you can actively introduce more complex concepts that derives many positive outcomes from learning about shapes when playing with your child. These include:
Comparisons: which shapes are similar and in what way, which shapes are different and why? For example shapes with curved sides vs straight sides. If using multi coloured sets this can be extended to colour comparison too.
Categorisation: comparison leads on to grouping shapes into geometric categories such as Triangles, Quadrilateral (4 sided) etc and also into colour groups.
Pattern recognition: arranging the shapes into repeating patterns according to the categorisation, including colour dimension, is another useful developmental area.
Basic mathematics: simply counting the shapes out is a good start but also consider counting the categorised groups (including colour groups) and also counting the sides on the shapes. Even mistakes offer an teaching opportunity as you can subtract the erroneously categorised shape from one group and add it to the correct group and thereby introduce basic maths. Name the shapes associated with the number of sides (especially for polygons like Pentagons and Hexagons) and explain the differences (e.g. between a square and a rectangle)
Problem solving and spatial relations: this is best achieved with a shape sorter type tool whereby your child is engaged and motivated to figure out how to get the shapes into the sorter holder and thereby associate the Three Dimensional shape with a Two Dimensional space.
At Little Wriggler we used a shape sorter toy London Bus with many complex three dimensional shapes to learn about basic geometry and to boost fine motor skills. The toy has the added benefit of using different coloured shapes so we can also learn about colours. It is a toy and a puzzle in one so engaging and fun for the child such that they play with it over and over again thus getting the practice they need to both garner the wide array of developmental benefits from learning about shapes and colours and developing fine motor skills.
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