A color game that starts with a guess

What your child learns

Learning colors is more than learning eleven words. Research shows that young children often say color words before they use them the way grown-ups do. Step by step, they work out which shades belong to each word, and that a strawberry, a ladybug and a ball are all red, even though they look nothing alike.

The game helps with that, step by step. First your child taps a pot of paint and hears three things in that color. Then the same colors turn up in a busy park, in a picture to color and in a memory game. Meeting one color in many places gives your child many chances to use the word.

Mixing adds cause and effect. Before the bowl is stirred, the game asks what your child thinks will happen. Scientists call such a guess a hypothesis: an idea you can test.

• Eleven color names, from red and orange to brown, black, white and gray
• Linking one color word to many different things
• Predicting what two paints will make, then checking
• Lighter and darker: what happens when you add white or black
• Listening to a question and choosing an answer

Why we made this game

Children ask color questions all day. What happens if I mix these? Where did the green come from? Why is that bird so bright? Knowing what a color is called is only one part of the answer.

We wanted a game that also answers "what happens if". So the mixing bowl holds ten recipes, from red and yellow to black and white. Some recipes show what white and black do: white makes a color lighter, and black makes it darker.

We also wanted a game that needs no reading. A friendly paintbrush guides your child and says every instruction out loud. A three-year-old can play alone, and a six-year-old can race through the quiz.

What children love about it

The mixing bowl is the favorite. Children drag two paints in, pick a guess and watch the brush stir. If the guess was wrong, both answers stay on screen, a cross next to a tick, so nobody feels tricked. Every new mix lands on a list of your child's own color recipes.

Building the rainbow comes a close second. Red goes on the outside, then orange, yellow, green, blue and purple on the inside. When the last stripe is in place, the brush explains that a rainbow appears when the sun shines through raindrops.

Then there are the animal facts. Flamingos are pink because of their food, and a polar bear has black skin under its fur. Children love passing these on to anyone who will listen. At the end of the quiz, every right answer is a drop of paint, and the brush paints a picture with them.

How to play it together

Sit with your child for the first few mixes. Before they tap a guess, ask them to say it out loud and tell you why. Then stir and see. A wrong guess is no big deal. What counts is making your best guess and learning from the result.

After playing, take the colors off the screen. Mix two paints at the kitchen table, or look for three red things on your next walk. The park hunt in the game works just as well in a real park.

Keep it relaxed. The CDC lists naming a few colors of items as something most children can do by age four. Color words take time, so there is no need to drill them.