Describing Words in English for Toddlers: What to Teach First (and Why Colours Come Last)

Your child can name twenty animals, six colours and every member of the family. Ask them what the ball is like, and nothing comes back. Not because they do not know — because nobody has taught them the words that describe.

Describing words are the smallest, cheapest upgrade available to a child's English. They do not add new things to talk about; they multiply what your child can say about the things they already name. Twenty nouns plus six describing words is not twenty-six words — it is closer to a hundred and twenty combinations, and the child does not have to learn a single new object to get there.

There is also a specific reason this stalls in a Ukrainian- or Russian-speaking family, and it has nothing to do with vocabulary. Your child will say "Ball big." That is not a mistake. It is a perfectly correct Ukrainian sentence wearing English words — and once you can see that, it is straightforward to fix.

Why six describing words beat twenty new nouns

Most home English follows the same curve. The child learns nouns, because nouns are easy to point at. Then more nouns. Then a few more. The vocabulary list grows and the sentences do not.

Describing words break that pattern, because they are combinatorial. A noun buys you one thing. A describing word attaches to every noun the child already has.

Do the arithmetic once and you will never spend a week on another animal set. If your child has twenty nouns and you add six describing words, you have not made twenty-six words. You have made up to a hundred and twenty two-word phrases — big dog, small dog, hot soup, cold soup, wet shoes, dirty hands — every one of them built from words the child already owns.

This is the same logic behind teaching action verbs before more nouns and behind position words like in, on and under. Function beats inventory. Six well-chosen words that combine will do more for your child's English than another twenty that just sit there.

There is a second reason, and it matters more than the arithmetic. Describing words are how a child stops labelling and starts commenting. "Dog" is a label. "Big dog!" is an opinion. It is the first moment your child uses English to tell you something you did not already know — and that is the moment English becomes a language for them rather than a subject.

The order describing words actually arrive in

Children do not pick up describing words in a random scatter. There is a broadly predictable sequence, driven by how concrete the property is and how easily a child can feel it.

Research on adjective acquisition is consistent on the broad shape: dimensional words like big and small are mastered earlier and more accurately than colour terms, even though colour words often appear in a child's speech first. Producing a word and understanding it are two different milestones, and with colours they can be two years apart.

Notice where colour sits. It is last — and it is the one nearly every parent, every flashcard set and every YouTube channel begins with.

Why colours are the hardest — and almost everyone starts there

Colours look like the obvious starting point. They are visual, there are eleven of them, and there is a song. So parents begin there, the child says "red" within a fortnight, and everyone concludes it worked.

Then you hold up a blue cup and the child says "red" again.

This is one of the better-documented findings in early word learning, and it has a name: slow mapping. Colour words are not learned in one go the way "dog" is. Children produce colour words long before they can use them accurately, and the gap is measured in years, not weeks. Work by Pitchford and Mullen found that once reliable colour knowledge finally arrives, nine basic colours land within a window of roughly three months — and then brown and grey lag as much as nine months further behind.

Three things make colour genuinely hard for a two-year-old, and none of them is effort:

• Colour cannot be felt. Big can be shown with your arms. Hot teaches itself in one lesson. Red has no body.
• Colour is never the object. Every other early word maps onto a thing. Colour is a property that floats across thousands of unrelated objects, and the child has to work out that the red of a jumper and the red of an apple are the same thing.
• The boundaries are language-specific. Where blue stops and green begins is a decision a language makes, and the child has to learn your language's version of it. This is exactly what the slow-mapping research points to — the delay is about learning the boundaries, not about grasping that colour exists.

None of this means skip colours. It means stop using them as your entry point and stop treating them as your progress test. If you want to know whether your home English is working, a child who says "hot!" before touching a radiator is telling you far more than a child who can recite six colours.

When you do come to colours — and there is a full guide to teaching the eleven colour words here — treat them as a slow background hum rather than a unit to be completed.

The missing "is": a Ukrainian sentence with no verb in it

This is the section that changes what you do tomorrow morning.

Your child will, reliably, say "Ball big." Or "Water hot." Or "Mummy tired." Parents hear this and assume the child has skipped a word out of laziness or is simply not ready for longer sentences.

Neither is true. Ukrainian and Russian have no present-tense form of "to be." "М'яч великий" is a complete, grammatical, adult sentence — and it contains no verb at all. The same is true of "Я студент" or "Вода гаряча". The link between the thing and its description is simply left out, because the language does not need it.

English does need it. And it is the single most frequent transfer error documented for Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking learners of English at every age — not a toddler quirk, but a lifelong one if it is never addressed. Adult learners still write "He very tired" after years of study.

The practical consequence is small and specific: never model a describing word on its own. If your child holds up a ball and you say "Big!", you have taught the adjective and confirmed the Ukrainian structure at the same time. Say the whole frame instead — "The ball is big." The child will still answer "Ball big" for a while. That is fine, and it is not the moment to correct them; our guide on whether to correct your child's English mistakes explains why recasting works and correcting does not. Your job is simply to make sure the complete version is the one they keep hearing.

There is a second, gentler place the same word hides: the two ways English lets you use a describing word.

• Before the noun: "the big ball" — used to pick something out. Give me the big ball.
• After "is": "the ball is big" — used to say something about it. Look, the ball is big!

Ukrainian uses both too, but its word order is far freer, so the child does not automatically learn that English keeps these two patterns strictly separate. You do not need to explain any of this. You need to use both, out loud, several times a day — which is what the phrase card below is for.

Start on the body, then the object, then the picture

The same four-stage progression that works for position words works here, and for the same reason: a child learns a property they can feel long before one they can only look at.

1. On the body. Big and small with arms: "Make yourself BIG!" (arms up) — "Now small!" (curl up). Hot and cold with hands on a warm mug and then a cold window. This costs nothing and needs no props.
2. On an object the child moves. Two balls, one big and one small. The child hands you one: "The big one. Thank you!" The child is doing the sorting, so the word attaches to an action.
3. On an object the child only watches. Bath water: "The water is warm." Soup: "Careful — the soup is hot." The property is real but the child is not manipulating it.
4. In a picture. A book: "Which dog is big?" This is the last stage, not the first — and it is where nearly every purchased flashcard set starts.

If a describing word is not working, drop it down a stage rather than repeating it louder.

Teach in pairs, never one word alone

"Big" on its own means almost nothing to a two-year-old. Big compared to what? A property is only visible against its opposite, which is why describing words should always enter the house in twos.

This is the same principle behind the opposite verb pairs — open/close, push/pull — in our action verbs guide. Contrast is what makes the meaning findable.

Six pairs. Twelve words. That is the entire first year of describing words, and every one of them already happens in your day whether you name it or not.

Six words, four moments, no new activities

You do not need a describing-words session. You need four moments that already exist, each carrying one pair.

That is ten to fifteen natural repetitions a day without adding a single minute to your schedule — which is the whole argument of our guide to daily English rituals at home. Repetition inside a routine beats intensity inside a lesson, every time.

The phrase card: exact wording, so you only get it right once

The most common reason home English drifts is not motivation. It is that the parent has to invent the sentence in the moment, in a language they are still thinking in, while the child is climbing something.

Write these twelve out once. Put them where the moment happens — the fridge, the bathroom mirror. Then you never have to compose again.

Two of those are doing extra work. "Do you want the big cup or the small cup?" is a forced-choice question — the child cannot answer it without using the describing word, and even a point counts as an answer. "Which one is small?" tests comprehension without demanding speech, which is the subject of the section below.

When two describing words meet: "big red ball"

Somewhere around three, your child will want to use two describing words at once. English has a fixed order for this that no native speaker is ever taught and no native speaker ever breaks.

The sequence runs, roughly: opinion → size → age → shape → colour → material. So it is "a lovely big old round red wooden bowl", and every other arrangement sounds wrong to an English ear without anyone being able to say why.

For a toddler, only one slice of this matters: size comes before colour.

• ✓ "a big red ball"
• ✗ "a red big ball"

Research on how children develop these ordering preferences finds that they do not start out adult-like — the preference strengthens gradually with exposure. Which is good news for you: there is nothing to teach and no rule to explain. There is only something to model consistently, so that "big red" sounds normal and "red big" sounds odd long before your child could tell you why.

If your child says "red big ball", do not correct it. Say it back the right way round — "Yes! A big red ball." — and move on.

Bigger and biggest: the ending with no Ukrainian shape

At three or four, comparison arrives, usually driven by fairness: whose piece is larger.

English has two ways of doing this and a rule that decides between them:

• Short words take an ending: big → bigger → biggest. Small → smaller → smallest.
• Longer words take a helper word: beautiful → more beautiful → most beautiful.

Ukrainian handles comparison differently — більший is a single changed word, and the split between "add an ending" and "add a separate word" has no equivalent your child can copy. The result is a predictable and completely harmless stage of "more big" and "more small", which lasts a few months and resolves on its own with exposure.

For ages one to five you only need three of them, and only for the words the child already uses daily: bigger, smaller, hotter. Everything else can wait for school.

The natural home for these is comparison the child cares about: "Your piece is bigger." "This spoon is smaller." "The soup is hotter than the milk."

Test comprehension, not speech

Describing words go into a child's understanding months before they come out of their mouth, so a child who says nothing may already know six of them. Asking "what colour is this?" measures confidence and mood as much as knowledge.

Here is a one-minute check that measures the right thing. You need two objects that differ in exactly one property — two balls of different size, two cups of the same size in different colours.

1. Put both where the child can reach.
2. Ask for one: "Can you give me the big one?"
3. Do not point. Do not look at the one you want. Children read your eyes long before your words.
4. Swap the objects' positions and ask again for the same one — this catches a child who has learned "the one on the left" rather than the word.
5. Then ask for the other: "Now the small one."

Three out of four correct, with positions swapped, means the word is genuinely there. Say nothing about testing and stop after a minute.

Run this once a fortnight, not daily, and only for words you have actually been using. Our guide on whether your child is actually learning English covers the wider set of progress signals that are worth watching.

What to expect at 2, 3, 4 and 5

Two caveats worth stating plainly. These ranges describe children with regular daily exposure, and they are a guide for noticing, not a standard to measure against — every column shifts with how many hours of English a child actually hears. And a bilingual child's describing words, like every other word class, should be counted across both languages; a child who says "великий" and understands "big" has the concept, and only needs the English label.

One family, four weeks

A mother in Dubai, son aged two years seven months, roughly a year of home English. His vocabulary was strong — around eighty English words, nearly all nouns — and his sentences were not moving. He also had all eleven colours, learned from a song, and could not reliably pick out a blue cup.

Week 1. We stopped colours completely. Two pairs only: big/small at getting-dressed, hot/cold at meals. The mother wrote four sentences on a card by the kettle. Nothing else changed.

Week 2. He started handing over "big one" when asked — comprehension, not speech, and exactly the first thing we wanted to see. He said nothing new.

Week 3. First production, at the bath: "Water hot." His mother's instinct was to correct it. Instead she answered: "Yes! The water is hot." Six or seven times across the week.

Week 4. "Water is hot." The is arrived on its own, from being heard, not from being taught. By then he also had wet/dry and was using "dirty" as a request to have his hands washed.

Colours came back in month three, quietly, with no song and no testing. They are still slower than everything else. That is exactly what the research predicts, and it is not a problem.

Seven mistakes that keep describing words flat

1. Starting with colours. The most visible property is the last one a child masters. Start with size.
2. Saying the adjective alone. "Big!" teaches the word and confirms the Ukrainian sentence shape at the same time. Say "The ball is big."
3. Teaching one word without its opposite. Big has no meaning until small exists.
4. Testing production instead of comprehension. "What colour is this?" measures willingness. "Give me the red one" measures knowledge.
5. Correcting "Ball big". It is a correct Ukrainian sentence, not a failure. Recast it and carry on.
6. Starting at the picture stage. Flashcards are stage four. The body is stage one, and it is free.
7. Adding a describing-words lesson. There is no slot for it, which is why it will not survive. Attach the words to four moments that already happen.

A two-week plan

Days 1–3. One pair only: big/small. Two moments — getting dressed and tidying up. Use the body version at least once a day: "Make yourself big! Now small!"

Days 4–7. Add hot/cold at meals. Write the four sentences on a card and put it where you cook. Keep saying the whole frame with "is".

Days 8–10. Add wet/dry at bath time. Start using the forced choice once a day: "Do you want the big cup or the small cup?"

Days 11–14. Add dirty/clean at hand-washing. Run the one-minute comprehension check on big/small. Do not add colours.

At the end of two weeks you will have four pairs living in four moments, with no lesson, no purchases and roughly twelve repetitions a day. That is the pace that lasts.

When it is worth asking someone

Describing words arriving late is, on its own, almost never a concern — they are a later word class and a bilingual child has two labels to sort out for every concept.

What is worth a conversation with your paediatrician or a speech and language therapist is a broader pattern, assessed across all of your child's languages, not just English:

• By around two, fewer than fifty words in total across both languages combined.
• By around two and a half, no two-word combinations in any language.
• Comprehension that seems not to be growing — the child does not follow simple familiar instructions in the home language.
• A loss of words or skills the child previously had.
• Any concern about hearing, including frequent ear infections.

None of these are about English. If they apply, ask in the language your child hears most, and mention the bilingual situation so nobody mistakes a normal bilingual pattern for a delay — a mistake our article on whether bilingualism delays speech looks at in detail.

Where the Mommy & Me English method fits

Everything above is deliberately free and deliberately small. Twelve words, four moments, one card by the kettle. If that is all you take from this page, your child's English will move.

What most mothers find hard is not the idea. It is the doing — remembering the sentence in the moment, keeping it going on the days that are already too long, and knowing whether the quiet week means it is working or not.

That is what the Mommy & Me English course is built around. It is a method for the mother, not a syllabus for the child: the rituals in the order they should arrive, the exact phrases for each moment so you never have to compose one under pressure, and the reasoning behind each step so you can adapt it to your own family instead of following a script.

It is taught by Kateryna Ivanova — Trinity College London CertTESOL, NILE Young Learners, with a background in speech therapy and primary education and nine years of teaching children. The method assumes you are not a fluent English speaker, because most of the mothers using it are not; our guide on teaching your child English when you are not fluent yourself covers that starting point in full.

See how the Mommy & Me English method works →
The full path from first words to first sentences, built around the day you already have.

The short version

Describing words are the cheapest upgrade available to your child's English, because they multiply words your child already has rather than adding new ones.

Teach them in this order: size, then physical state, then texture, and colours last — colours are the hardest, not the easiest, and they are the wrong place to start and the wrong thing to test. Always teach in contrasting pairs, always attached to something the child can hold, and always inside the full sentence.

And remember what your child is actually missing when they say "Ball big". It is not the describing word. They have that. It is the small English verb that Ukrainian does not have — and the only way it arrives is by being heard, in the ordinary moments of an ordinary day, until one evening it comes back out.