Classroom Use of Color to Motivate, Organize, and Boost Memory

Color can help students academically by helping them organize materials and ideas. It can also help teachers with classroom management and instruction. Learn how color can help motivate students, help students organize information and materials, and boost memory. Here are 6 ways color can help both students and teachers with instructional and learning tasks.

1. Color to Improve Memory

Most of us use bright markers for artwork, but highlighter pens can do more for us than add bright color to a page. Highlighter pens can organize. For example, a yellow highlighter pen can bring attention to important key points or main ideas on a page.

A pink highlighter pen can call attention to details, such as dates or names. Teachers can incorporate individual colors to emphasize specific facts. As a result, when students study materials, they can organize information or search out specific details by color. Hence, color enhances memory.

2. Color to Help Students Make Correct Choices

Here's how this works. If a student covers a book to match the color of a subject notebook, it's far less likely that student will grab the wrong book to take from locker to class or to take home as homework. Matching workbook, textbook, and notebook, keeps subject material organized and accessible.

3. Color to Help Students Keep an Organized Space

Inside some student desks, it looks like a cyclone hit. Same thing goes inside some student lockers or notebooks. Teachers can help all students better organize materials by using colored assignment sheets to denote certain subjects. This enables students to arrange materials in notebooks or files according to color. Homework pages or take-home sheets can be of one color--different from all other classroom papers. This helps students grab the correct sheet to take home.

4. Color to Help Teachers with Cooperative Tasks

When teacher have students form groups in the classroom for cooperative work, sometimes there is conflict over who's in what group. But here's an idea that keeps some of the conflict out. Have students list their favorite color, their second favorite, and possibly their third favorite. Group students according to favorite colors. Label groups by color. What student wouldn't want to be grouped with a favorite color?

5. Color to Help Teachers Manage Classroom Materials

Particularly for primary grades or preschool where reading skills are not fully formed, the color-coded system works well. Blue objects go in blue cubbies and green ones in green cubbies. Red objects go in red drawers, and so on.

6. Color to Facilitate Learning

Color and its affect on learning is a hot educational topic. One important factor to keep in mind when choosing classroom paint color is to consider light blue and light green colors to mimic earth and water. This has a comforting effect--especially during dreary winter months. For cubbies and personal areas, consider matching students with their favorite colors to enhance memory and attention.

If you're a teacher, use color to your advantage. Help motivate students with color, and help students make use of color to organize and boost memory.

Source

Colors and Learning, "How the Color of a Classroom Can Affect Students," by Dorit Sasson, http://www.suite101.com/content/colors-and-learning-a19816