Formative week: colours are all around us

"Look, my hands are orange and green!"
mixing colours using coloured ice
"I made green with blue and ...something"
In this formative week the children began exploring colours through a hands-on experience of coloured ice. The intent was to initiate some thinking and spark conversations/comments about what they notice in the colours as they play.
Here are their questions and comments:

Matthew: why is my hand brown? I only used this colour? (Pointing at red and yellow ice cubes)
Eva/Zoe: hey, it's Like a choo-choo ice train. It's like a rainbow train!!
Alley: you know, when I touched the yellow and blue I made green....I want to make purple!

We also began to discuss the different colours we might notice outside in Nature. The children helped me illustrate an outdoor landscape. They chose something that is part of nature and described the colour they want it to be.
Nico asked for a purple horse.
 Matthew wanted 2 snowy mountains with a gondola in between.
I asked if a gondola is nature and they all agreed that it isn't. I explained that if it is man-made then it is not part of nature. They all looked a little puzzled after that and started calling out things like cars, bird, boat etc. I drew all these and together we identified which are nature and which ones are not.

Separating humans and their creations from what is considered nature seem to confuse the children. Perhaps for them, everything is interconnected and that there really isn't any clear distinction between what is man-made and not. For this reason, we will limit our definition nature as something we might see in our forest and any other form of outdoor landscape.


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