november 2023
Exploring Colours
The school age children have been demonstrating an interest in colours and rainbows for the past few weeks. When using watercolours, the rainbow colours began bleeding into each other, mixing the colours together! C and A D noticed the blending and began to mix the colours together on their papers.
“Look at the colours! They’re mixing!” said C
“My rainbow is all over now!” said A D
To follow through with this interest, educators added a big drop cloth on the table and set out some paint and sponges to see how the children would interact with it. What began as sponge painting ended up turning into laying out handprints and blending the paint from the handprints with the sponges.
“I made a rainbow hand,” said R.
“The red and blue make purple!” said J B
“The colours are all mixing!” said C.
The drop cloth was covered in lots of colours and the children looked at the large creation and talked about how the different colours ended up looking.
“I tried to mix all the colours and it turned into brown,” said A.
The colour mixing interest wasn’t over in the school age room! The children still expressed interest in wanting to make “new” colours so with a little brainstorming we came up with another idea to mix colours: playdough! Using corn starch and lotion, we created the playdough and added colours in after. The children suggested using blue, red, and yellow.
“If we mix these together they’re going to be secondary colours,” said A.
A’s comment raised a question: what if we mixed the secondary colours together? After some investigating and exploring, the children noticed different colours forming when mixing the secondary colours together.
“It looks like its kinda gray, kinda blue,” said A.
“It’s a cool cyan,” said E.
With some help from educators the children learned what it is called when secondary colours are mixed together: tertiary colours!
“It’s like when you mix all the colours and it makes brown,” said A.
The children’s exploration isn’t over and we’re excited to see how this interest develops in the coming weeks!Jen Kesner RECE, Bobbi Abraham RECE,
Gagandeep Kaur B Phys Honours, BEd, MEd, specializing in environment and sustainability
