Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums Pre-school This is a really odd question...

You have to remember that gifted children are asynchronous. My daughter was similar to your little one, except she has taken to colors very early on, even naming colors like 'beige' and 'magenta' by the age of two as well as complex shapes. However, even though she's been reading for over a year and has always been very advanced in her speech, she's only VERY (and I mean very) recently started to get the concept of rhyming. I always wondered why she couldn't understand the rhyming concept when she was so advanced in seemingly every other area when it comes to letters and words. She's 4 yrs 2 months right now. Every child will have areas of strength and weakness.

My kids were all relatively late talkers, so by the time they had the language to name colors, it was evident that they could distinguish and sort by color, and just needed labels for them. One of my HG+ sibs struggled with the names of colors well after learning to read (so probably K age). Used to name colors by the name of an object commonly associated with that color. "This the color of a..."

There's this: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-johnny-name-colors/ which talks about why colors are more difficult than other words.

ds 28 months started shapes counting etc closer to 12 months, has only just in the last few weeks started to get colours and he still gets them wrong sometimes.
DD (now 4.11) first real words at 24 months were her colours -

I think their is normal, and then normal for your child. I do know kids will pick up colours if you use different colours of the same object (red truck, green truck etc) rather than red car, orange balloon....

I've met NT kids who don't know their shapes or colours at 4 so I'm sure you've got no reason to stress.

What I read when my kids were young was that MANY kids don't 'get' colors till they are around 3 years old. If you think about it, color is really an abstract idea. So from what I understand color is not something kids get before they get shape & numbers. And while many gifted kids can tell colors apart early, and lots of drill can help it's really not a big deal at 2.

My older daughter needed speech therapy and 2. And I kept getting comments from the therapists that she didn't seem to know her colors. I was perplexed, as I understood that this was normal. It was NOT a problem, sure enough by the time she was 3 she knew most colors and is now a college art student who has more an eye for color than her mom.

My son learned all his colors at 12 months - because he was obsessed with Thomas the tank engine - he learned the colors so that he could tell the trains apart. So, if your DS is into things like that, he could absorb the color differences naturally - that could be a way to teach colors without trying.

This is another data point that might shed an alternative hypothesis to either color blind or not knowing. My daughter knew her common colors well before she turned one, but then when she was a few months into being one, and lasting for many months, maybe from 14 to 20 months old, everything was yellow. It did not matter what it was if you asked her the color it was yellow. She would talk about other colors in conversation, Ie stop lights are red, but if you asked her what color a specific item was..."yellow." Sometimes she knew very well something like a stop sign is red and would get it right, but most of the time,..."Yellow."

This has started a long history of her suddenly not knowing things that she fully knew at a younger age. Although now at 3 she definitely does not hide knowing her colors, she does still do the same thing of completely claiming ignorance of things that she once had mastered. Yes, I know that regression is a warning sign, but I do not think this is true regression, but rather a sort of absolute boredom with material that which she has already learned.

Having read the article Kai's recommended Scientific American article, maybe what happened to my daughter was she learned the easy main colors, then started getting colors wrong that were not easy, and then decided it was easier to call everything yellow. Just speculation.

My son knew his basic colors by 12 months. I even have a video of him cruising about the living room at 9 months, seeing a stuffed animal,and saying yeyow tiger. So he knew at least one color then. By 2 he knew black, white, pink, etc. And by 3 all sorts of stuff like cafe au lait and chartreuse. He learned shapes before 1 as well and started counting shortly after. Clearly my son was an early talker. He started talking at 5 months and had hundreds of words by 18 months, we never thought much about him learning colors early, we were more impressed by his overall verbal skills and memory. He knew letters by 18 months and the sounds by 22 months and was able to spell and read short words by 2. He did not start really reading until 4. He's 5 now and we suspect he is gifted, but we are still waiting to find out.

As far as when it's normal to learn colors, the other kids we know seem to master it between shortly before 2 up into their 4s. I remember people being amazed my son knew his colors well into 2, even early in 3 sometimes, but my son is small for his age. I'm guessing 3 is when most kids master it.

Colour blind family here.

We have the odd situation that both my father and my husband are colour deficient, my father is protanope (completely red blind) and my husband protanomalous (red deficient, he needs good lighting to tell colours apart).
To clear up a popular misconception: there is no such thing as red green blind, but red blind and green blind have very similar results as the spectrum between the red and the green cones shifts only very slightly: they all see the world in blue and mustard ie yellow, orange, red, green, brown are all different shades of mustard to them, only for red blind people red looks darker, almost black. It's not like some colours are just gray, like black and white TV.

So both of our boys had 50 percent chance of red blindness (deficient X chromosome on my side of the family) and our daughter had a 50 percent chance of being red deficient (deficient X chromosome on my husbands side).

I knew early on what to look for: it's not about not knowing the names or mislabeling colours (apparently, it's normal to mislabel red and green up to four years) but about mismatching them, eg in board games with colour dice, and mismatching very specific combinations (green/orange, green/brown, blue/purple, and for red deficient kids red/black).

So when our oldest knew all the colours at two and matched almost all of them correctly, but consistently mixed up and mismatched these specific combinations, I decided to have him tested. (I test drove the bright green and bright orange snails from the snals pace race game which he kept mixing up by my colour blind father, asked him whether he cold tell a difference and he stared at them for the longest time and finally shook his head, so I knew those two were a good indicator!). Of course everyone kept telling me that it was all normal and you couldn't test kids this young blah blah blah.

Fast forward to vision testing at the university eye clinic where they insisted on doing a full vision work up before ever showing two year old DS the colour plates, with all the moving and asking and waiting around that entailed, and when DS was thoroughly exhausted and fed up they showed him the plates with the red bunnies or flowers or whatever it was dotted in red on green dotted backgrounds.

DS just stared at them and clammed up so they all whispered at me "can he even say these words?". I snapped back at them "he can say them all, he's just fed up now, he's two!". After which DS, still mute, correctly matched all the colour plates to their black and white equivalent by pointing.
So we came home with the result that DS had perfectly normal colour vision and I didn't believe a word of it.

Turned out that DS is very colour deficient, but not quite to the point my father is (phenotypes vary even though he's inherited his genetics) but extremely visually perceptive, and by taking his time (being a perfectionist HG+ kid he wanted to get this *right*) did manage to matche the tiny differences in brightness between the dots on the colour vision plates to the black and white equivalents provided.

But was by then too exhausted and fed up to explain.
So much for testing two year olds.

DD has normal colour vision.
With DS2, we have a hard time telling because he is so severely speech delayed, but he appears to know most names (grabs the right colour toy when told to) and to match colours correctly.

Tigers did a great job explaining color-blindness, but fwiw, just to throw in another color-blind family's experience - my dad was color-blind and so is my ds. DS knew his colors early on and could identify them. Color-blind people see color, they simply don't see the same color shades as non-color blind people. We didn't realize ds was color-blind until he was around 8 years old because he could tell us that green was green, even though he doesn't see green in the same color as I see green.

Even his school new he was color-blind from a screen in early elementary long before I did - the school assumed we (parents) knew and never bothered to tell us. We finally found out at a routine visit to the eye dr.

polarbear