Ask him to tell you just what you told him about it.
Ask him to pick out red from other colors, or A from other letters, or a moral act from immoral acts. This is Montessori teaching reduced to A B C, but it is teaching that is successful.
Our homes may be made as full of color and beauty for little children as are the Children’s Houses. The use of the prism, the Montessori color spools, the color top, our beautifully graded colored crayons and water colors for filling in outlined pictures, a study of the colored papers to be had for paper dolls’ clothes, the daily watching of the color changes in sunrise and sunset—all these open the spirit eyes of the child. Then we will lead children to notice and appreciate harmonious blending of tints and shades in our walls, our rugs, our gardens, our picture galleries.
Of what value is it that the child’s chromatic sense be trained by learning to know and discriminate between red, blue, and yellow, and from this to acquire a facility in knowing the scale of grays and browns? It means more for the child than just the soul-satisfaction that comes from learning how to use the eyes. It means starting the brain machine and then looking out for the switch.
The first morning that I met little Mario, one of my child Montessori friends in Rome, he looked me over from head to foot, ran to a color box, selected a color spool of the exact shade of gray blue of my suit and showed it to me joyfully. In almost the same second that he made this mental decision, he saw that the quick movements of little Valia were threatening the safety of a glass vase that stood, holding flowers, on a table at the opposite end of the room. Like a flash, Mario ran, held the vase, and prevented the catastrophe.
To be able to think down the color scale from blue to a blue that is mixed with gray; to be able to think in another kind of mental scale from cause to effect—these are both chromatic mind operations.
To know color means satisfying your child’s beauty hunger. It means, also, starting him on the road to logical thinking.