Color Shade Grading
Your child lays a handful of squares in a line, darkest at one end and palest at the other.
- Age
- 3 to 5, best at 3
- Setup
- 2 min
- Play
- 5 to 10 min
- Materials
- Household only
- Mess
- None
- You
- Set it up, then leave
Activity KG-A019
What you need
Paint chips are free, they are already graded, and the shop has forty colours of them. If there is no hardware shop in the week ahead, a single brushful of watery paint makes the same thing in ten minutes.
- Paint chips, two identical strips per colour3 to 4 colours Or: one strip of card painted in a fading wash. Or squares torn from magazine pages. Two strips of each is the trick worth knowing. One gets cut into squares to be graded, the other stays whole as the answer, so the child can check herself without asking anybody.
- A strip of card and watery paintx1 strip Or: watercolour, poster paint, even coffee. Load the brush once and paint a long strip without reloading, so it fades along its length, then cut it into squares. One brushful gives a smoother run of shades than mixing five pots does.
- A plain light tray or matx1 Or: a sheet of white paper. Or a baking tray. The ground decides whether the pale end is judgeable at all. A patterned tablecloth makes the two lightest squares impossible to separate, for the child and for you.
- A small tin or envelopex1 Five squares in a mint tin live in a coat pocket and turn a café table into this activity. It is one of the very few things on this shelf that travels.
- Clear packing tapeoptional A strip over the face of each square makes them survive months of handling. Untaped paint chips go soft at the corners after a fortnight of three year old fingers.
How to set it up
- Cut one strip of each colour into squares about 4 by 5 cm and keep the matching strip whole.2 min
- Lay the plain tray down and put the squares of a single colour on it, shuffled.20 sec
- Place the darkest square yourself at the left hand end, and sit back.10 sec
What to say and what to do
Say
Darkest first.
Which one comes closest to that one?
- Do not name the shades. This is work the eye does long before the words exist, and hunting for the right word gets in the way of it.
Do
- Lay the line left to right, darkest first, every time. It is the direction her eye will read in later, and having one fixed habit removes a decision she does not need.
- Sit somewhere with the light coming over her shoulder. Grading pale shades in the shadow of your own head is a light problem rather than an eye problem.
- Keep one colour per sitting to start, and change which colour it is. Four sittings on four colours beat one long sitting on all four.
Let be
- A line built palest to darkest. That is a correct grading, just the other way round, and it deserves to be named as one.
- Two squares swapped, then swapped back, then swapped again. The swapping is the comparing, and it is the entire activity happening out loud.
- A line assembled, taken apart and rebuilt three times. This is one of the few activities where doing it again immediately is the normal ending.
What it looks like when it is working
- She holds one square up against another rather than judging them from across the table.
- The two palest get put down, picked up and exchanged before she moves on.
- He turns the tray towards the window, or squints at it, without being told to.
- The finished line gets scrambled by her own hand so it can be done again.
What to expect at each age
At three
Grades three clearly different shades of one colour, confidently and quickly. With five, the darkest and palest go to the ends and the middle three land in whatever order they arrive in.
Separating shades that sit right next to each other comes later, and it comes on its own with no practice beyond doing this.
Lasts 5 to 8 minutes
At four
Grades five shades of one colour correctly most times, and starts checking against the uncut strip on her own. Begins naming them: dark blue, light blue, the middle one.
Grading two colours shuffled together is the next step, because it asks for sorting and grading at the same time.
Lasts 8 to 12 minutes
At five
Handles seven or eight shades, sorts two or three colours into separate lines, and can do it from memory with the strips face down and turned over one at a time.
Mixing paint to make the shade that is missing from a line is where this goes next, and it is a different activity with the same eye behind it.
Lasts 12 to 20 minutes
When it goes sideways
Each of these is the set of cards telling you something about its own difficulty, and all four are fixed by changing the cards rather than the child.
She lines them up but the order looks random
The steps between those shades are finer than her eye is separating this month. A paint chip strip often has eight shades on it, and eight is a lot.
Take out every other square. Three obviously different shades, then five when three is quick. The line comes out right immediately and stays right as the steps close up.
It is done in ten seconds and he walks off
The set is below his level, which is good news about him and bad news about the set.
Go to seven shades, or shuffle two colours together so they have to be sorted before they can be graded. Both changes take ten seconds and neither needs anything new.
She puts the palest first every time
That is a grading, and a correct one. The direction is a convention rather than a rule, and she has chosen the other one.
Say what she did, out loud, and then ask for the same line the other way round as a second round. Reversing a finished line is harder than building one and she will enjoy it more.
The pale end looks the same to me too
Light and background, almost always. Two pale shades on a printed tablecloth in a dim room are genuinely not separable by anybody.
White paper underneath and a window or a lamp straight on. If they still match after that, they probably do match, and one of them goes back in the tin.
Making it harder
Four rungs from one trip to the hardware shop. Each one adds a step, and the last one puts a paintbrush in her hand.
Three shades, one colour
- Ready when
- This is where everybody starts.
- What changes
- The darkest, the palest and the one from the middle of the strip.
- What is new
- That colours come in amounts, and that the amounts can be put in an order.
Five shades, one colour
- Ready when
- Three shades go down right, without any swapping.
- What changes
- The whole strip cut up, five squares, and the uncut twin left beside the tray to check against.
- What is new
- Comparing two squares against each other rather than against the ends of the line.
Two colours shuffled together
- Ready when
- Five shades of one colour are quick and mostly right.
- What changes
- Two strips cut up and mixed on the tray, to be sorted into two lines.
- What is new
- Two jobs at once: which colour is this, and then where in its own line does it go.
Mix the missing shade
- Ready when
- She grades seven shades without hesitating and starts asking where the colours come from.
- What changes
- A line with one square taken out of the middle, a pot of white paint, a pot of the colour, and a brush.
- What is new
- Making a shade rather than finding one, which is the point where an eye for colour turns into a hand for it.
Stop with the line finished and leave it on the tray. A graded row left out on the side gets scrambled and rebuilt by somebody walking past, and that is exactly what it is for.
How to keep it safe
There is very little to say about this one, which is part of why it travels so well.
- You cut the squares, and 4 by 5 cm is a good size for a hand that is still learning not to put card in its mouth.
- If you are painting the strips, use water-based children's paint and keep the water jar in from the edge of the table.
Why this helps
From the guide The claims here follow our guide on how patience actually develops.
Grading is a different operation from sorting, and it is the harder of the two. Sorting asks whether two things are the same or different, which has an answer. Grading asks which of two things has more of something, when both are the same thing and neither is the same as the last one, and that question has to be asked fresh for every pair in the line. It is the same operation as ordering by length, by weight or by loudness, and colour happens to be the version a three year old can see all at once, laid out on a tray.
The other half is that the material corrects itself. The line either runs smoothly from one end to the other or it has a bump in it, and the bump is visible from across the room without anybody saying a word. That is what lets a three year old do this alone, undo it, and do it again, and it is why the second strip left uncut beside the tray matters more than it looks: the answer is available to her, not held by an adult.
Skill practised: seeing more and less of the same thing, and putting it in order
This is not colour naming, and the names can wait. A three year old does this because a finished line looks right in a way she can feel.
One a week, at your child's age
We publish one new activity a week at each age, in exactly this format. This one is mostly worth watching for the pause, the few seconds where two squares are held side by side before either goes down.
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Questions parents ask
Is it alright to take paint chips from a shop?
They are samples and they are meant to be taken. Two strips of each colour is a reasonable handful; if you want a lot of them, ask at the counter and most paint desks will hand you a stack. Take the strips with the widest range on them, four or five shades, rather than the ones that only show two.
How many shades should we start with?
Three, and make them obviously different: the darkest on the strip, the palest, and one from the middle. A full eight-shade strip put out on the first day usually produces a random line, which tells you nothing except that eight was too many.
He sorts blues perfectly but muddles the reds and greens.
Grading inside a single colour works for every eye, so keep running it one colour at a time and he will get the same practice from it. If red and green are consistently the pair that mixes while the blues never do, it is a useful thing to mention at the next eye check, where it takes about a minute to look at.
Does this lead anywhere beyond colours?
It is the same mental move as ordering anything by degree, which turns up in measuring, in weight, in sound and eventually in number lines. Colour is the version where nothing has to be counted and nothing has to be remembered, so the ordering itself is the only thing happening. That is why it suits three so well.