Limiting Color in Resources

Most of the resources we have available to use in the classroom have multiple colors.

Taking out a couple of the colors (such as red and orange), or limiting the resource to a couple of colors, has many advantages and makes the resource more attractive.

Limiting the choice of colors on offer to the children limits the number of resources that could be dumped and gives an appearance of pattern. The products the children make are more visually appealing than if they were multi-colored.

Comments

Fascinating Sunflower Sprouts

When planting sunflower seeds, one of the children wanted to do it on his own. He got a white plastic bottle from the recyclables shelf, added some dirt, a couple of sunflower seeds, water and took it outside to put it in the sun. Such independence. Such initiative. It was fascinating to see that different children were interested in different aspects of the process.

Tape Man

Some of the children put blue tape over their mouth. Usually I would have said something like, "Take the tape off your mouth. It's not for putting on your mouth." Instead I thought of Tape Man (with some pride, being from New Zealand). I thought of creativity. I thought of art. So we sat together for whole group time, some with tape on their mouth. I said, "I've got something to show you." When they first say him one of them said, "It's scary." I reassured them that it's not too scary and that he's being funny. So they started to laugh. Pretty soon there was no more tape on mouths (not that I minded if there was, it's just hard to laugh). Thank you Tape Man for reminding us that creativity begins with exploration in play.

NZ Teacher

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