Veronika is showing great interest in colors now. She knows all the words of the rainbow, but adorably gets them all wrong. “Yellow!” she’ll say with confidence, holding a blue crayon. “Purple!” she calls out, to just about anything. So today we played this little game to help associate each color with the correct word.

I set out pairs of construction paper and crayons, sticking with only four colors so as not to overwhelm her. We used: blue, red, yellow, and green.

For each color, I showed her the crayon and said (for example), “Yellow. Can you find me the yellow paper?” I then directed her to the right sheet so she could draw yellow on yellow.

Repeat with the remaining colors, or reverse it: “Here is blue paper. Can you find me the blue crayon?”

After she’d scribbled for a while, I wrote the name of each color on the paper, using black crayon.

Don’t expect your toddler to get this “right” on the first try, of course, as that’s not the point. These early color games are all about introducing the concept.

And of course she loved just scribbling.