Color and its Use in the Classroom

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Color is very important to humans in how we process information. It is the first thing we see and recognize and is imprinted on the brain, helping us to recognize and recall facts later on. In this episode, we'll be chatting with Brigid Danziger of Math Giraffe to discuss color and its use and impacts in the classroom.

Brigid is the creator of DoodleNotes and is an expert on dual coding and visual and linguistic connections and how they lead to better retention, recall, and long term memory.

Join us for a fabulous episode jam-packed with insights and knowledge surrounding the power of color. And if you love it, screenshot it, tag us @teachingtoolboxpodcast and @mathgiraffe, and let your friends know about the hottest new podcast in town.

Links Mentioned in the Podcast:

Classroom Organization with Colors Blog Post

Eric Jensen's "Brain Based Learning"

Math Giraffe's Blog

Math Giraffe on IG

How Color Affects Student Learning Blog Post

Dual Coding theory & Visual Note Taking Blog Post

Related Episodes

Ep 9: A Guide to Study Skills - Strategies, Techniques and Insights into Teaching Study Skills

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Amazon links are affiliate links from Brittany Naujok and The Colorado Classroom, LLC®. I earn a small amount from your clicks on these links.



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Transcript:

The Use of Color in the Classroom

[00:00:00] Narrator: You're listening to The Teaching Toolbox with Brittany and Ellie. Join them as they talk all things middle school.

[00:00:20] Ellie: Hey there! I'm Ellie and I'm here with Brittany.

[00:00:24] Brittany: Hello!

[00:00:25] Ellie: And today we're going to step into the colorful world of education on The Teaching Toolbox, the podcast tailor made for middle school teachers. In this episode, we're unlocking the secrets of teaching with color, using color to bring lessons to life, Organization with color that can make your classroom look like a work of art, and a whole spectrum of strategies to inspire and empower our young learners.

[00:00:49] Ellie: Today, we have the pleasure of welcoming our guest, Brigid of MathGiraffe, to help us tune into color. Welcome, Brigid.

[00:00:57] Brigid - Math Giraffe: Thank you.

[00:00:58] Ellie: Do you want to tell us a little bit about yourself before we get into all things color?

[00:01:03] Brigid - Math Giraffe: Sure.

[00:01:04] Brigid - Math Giraffe: At Math Giraffe, I focus on blending creativity into the classroom, and especially in math class.

[00:01:10] Brigid - Math Giraffe: So we can get both hemispheres of the brain involved, and kind of activate that stronger learning by getting kids to get a little more creative.

[00:01:18] Brittany: Cool. Well, when I think of using color in the classroom, I mainly used it for organization. I used it in an elementary experience, mainly for myself. In benefiting myself so that I could organize my materials and supplies and storage areas to make everything flow better for myself in that respect.

[00:01:44] Brittany: And so every week I would go through the colors in rainbow order, because that made logical sense to me, rainbow order. And each week would be a different color, so I'd start out with pastel pink, and so the spelling list would be in pastel pink. And the homeworks for that week would be in pastel pink, and the behavior chart for that week would be in pastel pink.

[00:02:07] Brittany: Everything was in pastel pink for me that week, and then the next week I'd switch to, like, salmon, and then to light yellow, and so on. And when I moved to middle school, I still needed to use color. Color is very important to me in helping my brain understand things. And so, in middle school, I used it more for the students benefit, where I separated...

[00:02:35] Brittany: My class periods into colors and so I had like first period was red third period was yellow And so on. And then everything in that class period was done in that color. So when I wrote on the agenda board, it was in red or it was in yellow or it was in green. When I had their portfolios up front, they were in red, yellow, green, blue, purple.

[00:03:02] Brittany: Their reward buckets were in red, yellow, green, blue, purple. And so that's how I've mainly used color in my experience teaching. But I know it can be used in a lot of other ways. I do have a blog post about using color in the classroom for organization. I will link that in the show notes. But I know you can also use it for like differentiation.

[00:03:29] Brittany: There's, you know, wars all the time on the internet about what color is math or what color is science, you know. And people like get all offended and stuff, you know. I always considered math to be red. What about you guys?

[00:03:47] Brigid - Math Giraffe: But I love the idea of sorting by class period. That's so smart.

[00:03:53] Ellie: Yeah, I was not nearly as colorful as you and in my organization within my classroom, but I did use different color folders for different classes that at one point in time I used to have, I used to make them keep everything in the classroom at a point in time where they were always losing things.

[00:04:08] Ellie: And so when we did that, I had those, stair files, and I would keep all of their folders in there. So like first period might be red and second period might be green and third period blue. And then they would know exactly where those folders were in the classroom. And if I happen to move them, they could just identify which color they were looking for, which color was their class.

[00:04:32] Ellie: And they could easily find those. So I did the thing, you know, that with, with their class periods. But then. If students had trouble organizing themselves personally, as far as getting their homework done, keeping their notebooks organized, things like that, that was often something that we would suggest to them, that they use the same color notebook and folder and everything for a particular subject.

[00:04:58] Ellie: So maybe they kept a red folder with a red notebook for math and a green folder with a green notebook for science and a blue notebook with a blue folder for social studies, whatever the case may be. And then even in their assignment books, if they took and either wrote their assignments in that matching color or put a square around the block for that subject in