Learning at Home

A Colour Mixing Chart That Actually Held Their Attention

On teaching at three campuses, a borrowed kind of childcare, and a chart drawn on the back of a handout.

Three campuses, two toddlers, one degree still unfinished

For a long stretch of my daughters’ toddler years, I was lecturing at more than one university at once, the ordinary arrangement for a lot of academics in Indonesia trying to make a full-time income out of several part-time contracts. I was also partway through a Master’s in Education, studying the theory of exactly the kind of early learning I had almost no time left to actually give my own two girls.

My eldest was born in 2003, her sister in 2005, so for a good few years they were both genuinely small at the same time, one a toddler, one not far past it. We didn’t send them to formal daycare. Instead, my ex-husband’s sister and brother looked after them during the day while I moved between campuses, which I was, and still am, deeply grateful for, even though it came with its own quiet complications I didn’t always know how to name at the time.

A typical day involved an early class at one university, a gap spent marking or preparing for the next, then a later class somewhere else entirely, sometimes a genuine trip across the city depending on traffic. By the time I’d finished the last class, collected the girls, and gotten everyone home, the day had usually run twelve or thirteen hours from the first alarm. There simply wasn’t a version of that schedule that left room for an elaborate evening activity, no matter how much I wanted to provide one.

Evenings were short and I was usually depleted by the time I collected them. I wanted whatever time we did have together to matter, to be more than just dinner and bed, but I rarely had the energy left for anything that looked like a proper activity.

The flashcards that never left the bag

Early on, guilt did what guilt usually does, and I bought a set of laminated colour flashcards from a shop near one of the campuses, the kind with a bright picture on one side and the colour name printed underneath. I had a genuine plan to sit down with the girls each evening and work through them properly, the way a proper structured early literacy unit from my own coursework might have suggested.

They came out of my bag perhaps four times in total. By the time I’d picked the girls up, sat through dinner, and gotten everyone bathed, there was nothing left in me for a seated flashcard drill, and on the rare evening I did attempt it, both girls were too tired to hold much interest either. The set sat in the bottom of my bag for months, a small physical reminder of the mother I’d meant to be that evening and hadn’t managed to be.

Where the actual idea came from

The chart itself came out of nothing more deliberate than desperation. One evening, sitting at the kitchen table marking a stack of undergraduate assignments I still needed to finish before the next morning’s class, my younger daughter climbed up beside me wanting something, anything, of my attention. I had no toys within reach and no energy for a proper activity. What I did have was a red pen, a stack of scrap paper from the unmarked side of a handout, and a very tired brain.

I drew three circles, overlapping slightly in the middle, and coloured them in as best a red biro allows, red, yellow, and blue. Then I showed her where red and yellow overlapped and asked what colour she thought that middle bit should be. She had no idea, obviously, she was barely three. But she was completely still and completely focused in a way the flashcards had never once managed to produce.

Her older sister wandered over a few minutes later, drawn by the stillness more than anything, which was itself unusual enough to be worth noting. Within ten minutes we’d actually mixed a little diluted paint to test what the drawn chart predicted, and both girls were, for once, not asking to watch television or fighting over a toy. They were testing a picture against reality, which is a fairly serious thing for two small children to be doing on a Tuesday evening with nothing but a biro drawing and some watered-down paint.

Why the drawing worked when the flashcards hadn’t

It took me a while afterwards to work out why the scrappy drawn version outperformed the properly printed, laminated one so completely, and I don’t think it was really about effort or love, both of which I’d genuinely put into the flashcards too. I think it was about what each object actually asked of the girls.

The flashcards asked them to memorise an arbitrary label attached to a picture, red goes with this card, blue goes with that one, a fairly dry, closed task. The chart asked them to predict something and then go check whether they were right, which is a completely different kind of engagement, closer to a genuine question than a drill.

Where it got hard to keep going

Knowing the chart worked better didn’t make it easy to actually repeat consistently, and I think that part gets left out of most tidy versions of stories like this. The exhaustion that had made the flashcards impossible didn’t disappear just because I’d found something simpler. There were still plenty of evenings where even drawing three circles felt like more than I had left to give, and I had to let those evenings simply be what they were rather than forcing the chart onto a night with nothing behind it.

There was a financial layer to it too, worth being honest about. Between several part-time lecturing contracts, money was genuinely tight, and I remember feeling a small sting of embarrassment that my own children’s learning materials were a biro drawing on the back of someone else’s assignment rather than something properly bought and printed, the kind of thing I imagined better-resourced parents were providing their toddlers. It took me longer than it should have to see that the homemade version wasn’t a lesser substitute for something I couldn’t afford. It was, quite plainly, the better tool, and it had cost nothing.

There was an odd tension too in being formally trained in early childhood education while a scrap of paper outperformed anything from my own coursework. Studying pedagogy properly, in a Master’s program, somehow made it harder rather than easier to trust something this unstructured and improvised. I kept half expecting a “real” activity to eventually work better, and it never did, not once, across either of my daughters.

My two girls also needed genuinely different things from the same chart, being two years apart. My younger daughter, still very much a toddler, was happy just naming colours and watching them combine. My older daughter, a little further along, wanted to guess the result before we tested it, and eventually wanted to try mixing combinations we hadn’t shown her, which the same simple chart handled without needing to be redesigned, it just stretched to whichever level each girl brought to it that evening.

And there was a quieter obstacle too, one I’ve thought about more since. Handing the girls to their aunt and uncle each day, however loving and however necessary, came with a private ache about not being the one raising them day to day. The evening chart became, without my fully realising it at the time, less about colour theory and more about reclaiming a small, undivided pocket of the day that was unmistakably ours. I don’t think that changes anything about why the chart worked, but it’s part of honestly why I kept reaching for it on the evenings I had anything left to reach with.

What the chart actually looked like, if it helps

Nothing about it needs to be fancy, which is really the whole point. Three circles, overlapping in the middle, each filled with one primary colour, red, yellow, blue, with the overlapping sections left blank for a child to predict and then test.

The testing step mattered more than I initially gave it credit for. A static chart that’s already fully coloured in tells a child an answer. A chart with blank overlaps and a genuine way to test the prediction turns the same picture into a small, repeatable experiment, which is a very different kind of learning experience for a toddler than simply being shown a finished fact.

Once the basic three-circle version stopped being new, a few small variations kept it going for months rather than fading after a week, the way most toddler activities eventually do in our house. Adding white to a mixed colour and asking what happened to it. Trying the same mix with more or less water to see if the colour changed strength as well as hue. Later on, once my older daughter had a reasonable handle on the basics, letting her draw her own chart from scratch, deciding where the circles should overlap and predicting the results before I’d say anything at all.

If you’re the aunt, uncle, or grandparent doing the actual daytime care

My children spent more waking hours with their aunt and uncle most weeks than they spent with me, and I think it’s worth speaking directly to whoever is actually doing that daytime care in a family, since a site like this one tends to assume a parent is reading, and that assumption isn’t always true. The chart works exactly as well in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday afternoon as it does in a rushed evening, and it asks nothing of the person running it beyond a pen, some paper, and a few spare minutes.

If you’re the family member holding down the daytime care while a parent works, whatever that arrangement looks like in your own family, this is as much for you as for anyone reading this as a parent. The small back-and-forth explained further down doesn’t require a biological parent to deliver it, it requires an adult willing to sit down for a few minutes, and that’s a role plenty of aunts, uncles, and grandparents already fill every single day, often without much acknowledgement for it.

A few things I’d have found useful to hear back then, if I’d thought to ask my ex-husband’s sister and brother more directly rather than quietly worrying about overstepping. You don’t need permission from the parent to try something like this, a scrap of paper and a pencil isn’t a big enough intervention to need clearing with anyone first. You also don’t need to report back on it or turn it into evidence of how well the day went, the value is in the moment itself, not in what gets relayed afterwards.

If you’re caring for more than one child at different ages, the same three-circle chart genuinely does stretch, the way it did for my own two girls two years apart. A younger child can simply watch and name colours as they appear. An older one can predict first and test second. Neither needs a different activity, just a different level of question asked around the same drawing.

Where this idea comes from

Colour words are genuinely, measurably harder for toddlers to learn than most other early vocabulary, and this isn’t just a parenting impression, it’s been studied properly. Cognitive scientists at Stanford found that two-year-olds who could correctly use colour words in everyday phrases, “red fire truck,” “blue sky,” still failed badly when actually tested on identifying colours directly, a strange gap that puzzled researchers for years.

Part of the explanation is that colour is everywhere all at once, unlike, say, the difference between a dog and a bear, which rarely show up in the same scene together. A toddler hearing “red” is usually surrounded by a dozen other colours at the same moment, making it genuinely difficult to work out which hue the word is actually pointing at. Ordinary nouns don’t have this problem nearly as badly, which is part of why children reliably learn words like “dog” and “cup” well before they reliably learn “red” or “blue,” across every language researchers have studied.

What surprised the researchers most, and what surprised me reading it years later, is that simply repeating colour words over and over doesn’t fix the problem the way repetition usually helps with other vocabulary. Children who received hours of direct colour-word training still made major errors well past the age most parents assume colours are already mastered. Something about the sheer surrounding noise of colour seems to resist brute repetition in a way other early words don’t.

Scientific American’s coverage of this research goes into the detail properly, including a simple phrasing trick the same researchers found genuinely improved toddlers’ colour learning, saying “the crayon is red” rather than “the red crayon,” since it narrows a child’s attention to the object first before attaching the colour to it.

Reading that years later, I recognised exactly what the chart had been doing without me knowing the theory behind it. It narrowed the field. Instead of colour existing everywhere at once, vague and overwhelming, the chart gave each colour a fixed, small, predictable place to live, three circles, one spot each, with a clear rule for what happened when they met. That’s really all a small child needs, not more exposure to colour, which they already have constantly, but a structure that makes the existing exposure make sense.

Knowing when the chart’s job is finished

It’s worth saying plainly that this particular chart eventually stopped being useful, and that was a good sign rather than a problem. Once my older daughter could confidently predict every combination before testing it, the three circles had done their job, and holding onto the exact same activity past that point would have started teaching boredom rather than colour.

The signal to move on was fairly obvious in hindsight, less genuine surprise on their faces when a prediction turned out right, more of a bored, going-through-the-motions checking of the paint against the picture. Once that showed up, we let the chart quietly retire and moved on to something else, without any ceremony about it. The tool had done exactly what it was for, and nothing about a simple pencil drawing needed to be precious or permanent.

Where this connects to the worksheets

I think about that kitchen table drawing often when we design a new tracing page. The temptation is always to add more, more colour, more decoration, more on the page. What actually helps a small child is usually the opposite, one clear, small structure they can predict and test themselves against, the same as three overlapping circles on the back of a handout.

If you want to see the same idea in a different form, the alphabet tracing template gives a letter exactly one small story to hold onto, nothing more elaborate than that, for much the same reason the chart worked better with three circles than a whole set of flashcards.

What I’d tell myself at that kitchen table

My girls are adults now, and the flashcard set is long gone, though I genuinely couldn’t tell you when it finally got thrown out. What’s stayed, oddly, is that I can still picture the exact biro drawing from that evening, and both of them, when I’ve mentioned it since, remember mixing paint at the kitchen table far more clearly than anything from actual toys we owned at the time.

If I could go back to that exhausted evening, marking papers with a toddler climbing into my lap, I’d tell myself not to feel guilty about not having the energy for something bigger. The thing that actually worked was already sitting in my hand. It just needed three circles and four spare minutes, not a shop-bought set or a proper lesson plan from my own coursework.