Sorting by colour is harder than naming a colour, because the child has to judge every object in a row rather than colour the one thing on the page. Every picture here prints without any colour information at all, which is exactly the point: a child cannot see which object is really red on a black-and-white page, so they have to use what they already know about the real world instead. A stop sign, a carrot, a banana, a frog and a whale each have one colour a child will agree on, and the row always mixes two of them together. The easiest sheets name both the object and the colour, so the child only has to find and colour one picture.
The middle sheets name only the colour, so the child has to decide for themselves which picture in the row is really that colour before picking up a crayon. The hardest sheets name no colour at all: the child colours each of two pictures the colour it really is, with the whole crayon box to choose from. Because a coloured-in page cannot be checked by a computer, a grown-up reviews the work, the same way any colouring page would be checked.
What your child will learn
Decide which real objects are really red, orange, yellow, green or blue
Find the one picture in a row that matches a stated colour
Leave objects alone that do not match the target colour
Colour a picture the colour it really is, with no colour named
Worked example
The row shows a strawberry and a frog with no colour printed on either of them. The grown-up says, colour the green thing green. The child knows a frog is the green one, so only the frog gets coloured.
Common mistake
Colouring every picture in the row instead of checking each one against the stated colour first.
Helpful hint
Ask yourself: is this really that colour in real life?
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