Hi Moms.
My 4yr old son, has been working through many learning issues due to his severe reflux as an infant. We were a little late in treating the reflux (he was 6 mos old) and the treatments worked well. He was completely off treatments by the time he was 14 months old, and around that time is when he started learning to communicate (without crying). We were pretty dedicated to improving his vocabulary and found that he need a good deal of effort to communicate with us. The next year, he was determined by the speech therapist to be 6 months behind. The books that we were using to sooth him in the evenings were all books with shapes and colors, and he was VERY insecure about the answers when we asked him about the shapes and colors. So... we assumed that this was part of a larger learning disability, so we didn't pressure him. We just started reading different (more interesting) books. And we changed the videos that he would watch, from Baby Einstein to LeapFrog. Fast Forward - he turns 3, and he starts spouting letters while I am reading the nightly book. Then I noticed a pattern, and started pointing to the letter and he says it! I am FLOORED!! He knows all of his letters, numbers & shapes! But... everytime I ask him to point to the red circle, he will point to the purple circle, etc. I am really starting to believe that he is color-blind. Then, at age 4 he starts to make less mistakes when he guesses at the colors, but I believe that he is really adaptive, and can figure out, without really knowing, what color he is supposed to say.
Does anyone have any advice as to how to proceed? He is scheduled to start Pre-K next year, and I want to make sure that we (and his teacher) are armed with whatever we need in order for him to succeed in school.
I am not certain that I am familiar with a color blindness that confuses red with purple all though I guess it is possible. The most frequent forms of human color blindness involve difficulties in discriminating reds, yellows, and greens from one another. They are collectively referred to as "red-green color blindness". Other forms of color blindness are much more rare. They include problems in discriminating blues from yellows, and the rarest forms of all, complete color blindness or monochromacy, where one cannot distinguish any color from grey, as in a black-and-white movie or photograph.
So I am curious if he is just not certain of the colors? Perhaps work with him with primary colors (red, green, yellow, blue) like with a shape sorter and see if he recognizes those colors. If he can differentiate the primaries, I think he is probably fine.
Susan,
My daughter did research on color blindness several years ago. I do not recall just where that paper is, but you can go online. She actually printed and presented in her paper diagrams that one could look at and it would help determine which level an individual was in. I seem to recall males are more predominately color blind than females. Good luck.
Alesia C.
Bring him to an eye doctor. They do color blindness tests. I know that my eye doctor checks my kids every year at their checkup. It's a simple test. Just looking at pictures and letting the doctor know what numbers or letters they see.