Natural Color Palette

I had carried my ukulele to the session and played some songs as we waited for everyone to assemble. Once all the little ones had arrived, we started with regular hello song and warm up. Salvin had a new game named house, tenant, flood. This game called for pair formations among participants, dissolving into chaos and then again into order. Afterwards, we introduced our much awaited intro exercise of visual arts. Salvin and children had a conversation about colors children are familiar with in the nature, such as color of leaves, flowers etc. then we all went out to collect few items from in and around our park. When we got back, we checked our ideas of color against what we had actually collected. For example, children, when asked what color are leaves, most certainly replies ‘green’. However when the leaves are actually paid close attention, we see a variety of colours, other than different shades of green, there are white, red, yellow, brown etc.

We used the collected material such as leaves, stems, flowers, stones etc to make a natural colour palette. It was quite rewarding to see the wonderment in children when leaves and flowers were rubbed against paper creating impressions in gentle colors. They eagerly tried different materials and whoever could, wrote down the name of the color and the material that created that colour. They looked pretty content and excited about the outcome which was a set of color patches on their sheet, neatly arranged and named. I also want to acknowledge their disappointment when some colors didnt turn out the way they wanted- not bright enough, not as per their expectation, or some leaves wouldnt leak any color at all! Yes, handling disappointment and accepting them is part of explorations too!