Color – Easy to Implement Strategy

When my son was in preschool I asked him who was in his class. He replied, ” Natalie, she’s the yellow heart.” Children learn color before they learn words because it is easier to process.

preschool shapes and colors

This is found in children’s toys with color used to guide use of toys.

keyboard for childrens book

The obvious use of color in real life in traffic lights. The colors represent different concepts with red being used universally in the U.S. as representing stop. Color is used to partition an object into sections, as often seen in maps of areas with different sections. Think of how many highlighters are sold to college students to help them highlight key passages in textbooks.

traffic lightsFenway Park, Boston Red Sox's Ballpark - Ballparks Of Baseball in Miller Park Seating Chart With Seat Numbers Image

The use of color help convey information, especially sections of a whole is an effective and easy to use instructional or support strategy.

The top two images below show my earliest attempts to use color. The student for whom this was used was a 7th grade student with asperger’s who tested in math and reading at a 1st grade level.

In lieu of referring to the “horizontal line” I can refer to the “yellow line” as in “find the yellow 3” for plotting the point (3, -2). Color, as in the aforementioned yellow heart, is much more intuitive for students, especially those with a disability.

coordinate plane

Color was used for the same student to represent positive and negative numbers, first with concrete tokens then with colored numbers on paper.

adding integers chips and colored pencils (2)

More examples are shown below. Color helps a student focus on the different parts of an equation or different parts of a ruler.

linear equationsruler

Color can also help organize a room into different parts. Each color represented different courses I taught, e.g. green was used for algebra 2. The room is more organized because of the sections outlined in color. Consider how this can help a student with ADHD, autism or an executive functioning disorder.

 

classroom

Analyzing a Graph

analyze-graph-using-color

Students can hit a road block at the steps that appear to be very simple. For example, in the problem below the students are prompted to find the highest point on the graph. Many think the graph refers to the entire coordinate plane and they pick 5 as the high point. It is the highest point on the y-axis but not the graph. I introduce the problem by highlighting the actual graph in pink and explain that this highlighted line is what is meant by the graph.

Analyze Graph Using Color Coordinate Plane Only - Edited.jpg

The use of color also helps students distinguish between the x and y axes and what the variables x and y represent in the context of the problem (# minutes and # kilometers in this problem) – see photo above. This problem also involves plugging in a # for x (blue) IN the function (red). In the photo below you see how I use color to help emphasize this.

analyze-graph-using-color-function-notation-only-edited

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