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Learning Colors

Learning colors is a basic skill that toddlers, preschoolers and kindergarten children are taught by teachers, caregivers and parents. There is more to colors than just recognizing each color and being able to state the names.

Children should also learn about primary colors and mixing colors to make new colors. This page goes over the primary colors, secondary colors and tertiary colors. Plus you will find several worksheets and color activities to help your children learn all about colors.

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Learning Colors - Understanding Primary Colors

Primary colors are those colors that cannot be created by blending other colors. Although black and white cannot be created by blending two different colors they are not called primary colors for color mixing purposes.

Black and white may or may not be considered a color. This all depends on who you ask and what answers you get. For the sake of learning colors however, we think of black and white as colors that we teach our kids.

There is no need to get scientific about why black is not a color or why white maybe a color for the learning process at this age. So, for now we will focus on all colors (including black and white) for the learning colors activities.

For the purpose of learning colors and teaching kids the many different colors we will first focus on the primary colors. As stated above, these are colors that cannot be created by mixing two or more colors together. The primary colors are;

Red

Yellow

Blue

These primary colors, when mixed together, create new colors. These new colors are the secondary colors. The secondary colors, when mixed with primary and other secondary colors, make tertiary colors.

Just keep reading to learn about these new colors created from the primary colors.

Secondary and Tertiary Colors

color pinwheel for learning primary and secondary colors

There are a total of 3 secondary colors - Orange, Green and Purple.

Orange is made by mixing red and yellow. Green is created by blending yellow and blue and purple is made with blue and red.

Additional colors, called tertiary colors, are made by mixing the secondary colors with the adjacent primary colors. There are a total of 6 tertiary colors as follows; red-orange, red-violet, yellow-green, yellow-orange, blue-green and blue-violet.

color wheel fan for learning colors

From these primary, secondary and tertiary colors you can make a whole variety of different values of these colors. Value basically is the amount of light or dark tones that they take of these colors. For instant, to make a different hue of red, you can add white to red and produce pink - which is basically a light hue of red.

To make a color darker you would add black to make it a darker hue. You can also add a variety of different colors to produce new hues and colors. For example, combining yellow and blue (which equals green) to the primary color red you will get a form of brown. The hue will depend on the mixture.

For more learning colors fun, check out these color crafts for kids.

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