Memories of a kindergarten colour inquiry
Usually a new inquiry has a prominent ‘spark’, but our colour inquiry was one that we simply decided collectively, as a class, to venture into. The spark was really just a conversation.
At the end of our airplane inquiry, we had taken down the giant sky mural, and a student said, “Now what will we paint on the wall??”
I said, “We always paint things about our inquiries…I wonder what our next inquiry will be…I wonder what we’re going to want to learn about…”
She said, “I want a rainbow on that wall!”
I said, “Well, is there something that you want to learn about rainbows? Do you think other friends will want to learn about rainbows?”
She said, “All the colours! Can we learn about all the colours?”
I said we’d ask all the kids what they thought, and after having a whole-class conversation, the students had agreed that an inquiry about colours would be fantastic. The students wanted to learn about how to make more colours of playdough, how to colour the snow, and how to make rainbow food. They wanted to ‘make a colour explode’, and they also wanted to turn the physical classroom space into a ‘colourful shop’ with a place to sell rainbow food, a place to buy special art supplies and a place to buy colourful clothes. These sounded like fun ideas, so we set to work together to make them all happen! As always, we filled our class library with books about colours, and the students made various plans for the various areas of our room that they wanted to change.
(Making the sign for the colourful shop)
Throughout our colour inquiry, we played and problem-solved outside too - looking for new and improved ways to make the snow colourful, building an ice castle with colourful snow, and inventing new games to play in our castle. We wrote every day about our memories in our outdoor learning journals.
The colour inquiry went in a super interesting and unexpected direction when we ended up wondering and researching a lot about the colours of flags from around the world. This came about when a student wanted to add many flags to our snow castle: “We should put a Canada flag and an India flag because that’s my ‘other country’, India. And I want to know about all the colours of all the friends’ flags from their ‘other countries’.” When this student invited others to join her to research about their 'other country' flags, almost every student joined in so they too could add their flags to our castle. This flag portion of our inquiry provided a perfect opportunity to review 2D shapes, and to introduce symmetry.
Indoors, besides playing in our 'colourful shop', we also did science experiments to try to ‘make a colour explode’ using materials and ideas that students brought from home or that we’d found when researching online. Although they never made an actual colour explosion, they expressed insightful observations and developed interesting theories about how and why the colours or consistencies of materials change in different kinds of liquids. (E.g. “The colours are dancing!” “The water has electricity,” “There’s colour juice inside those Skittles and when the water touches it, if it’s warm, the juice comes out!” “The milk made a tornado,” “The soap made a burst!” “The red and yellow made lava colour,” “We should put two tablets to make more bubbles because the first tablet doesn't have lots but the second tablet makes it have magic, I think, so LOTS of bubbles!”)
When we noticed the students discussing various colours of foods in their lunches, we took photos to make some class books about colourful healthy foods to use during guided reading (or independent reading) times. We read colourful books from the library, too. We also made beautiful artwork and danced with colourful ribbons. Throughout the entire inquiry, we found many meaningful opportunities to extend students’ play to include patterning, money, time, and measurement (mass/capacity) concepts.
The colour inquiry took another interesting and unexpected twist when a student looked at a book from our class collection and noticed a picture of a ‘rainbow’ made of various skin tones.
She showed some friends and they asked wonderful questions:
"Why are all skins different colours?"
"I wonder why my skin is a little bit lighter than my mom's and a little bit darker than [friend]'s."
"Why don't I have any sprinkles (freckles)?"
“What is the colour of a kid if the mom has light brown skin and the dad has dark brown skin?”
"Can skin change to different colours?"
"Why does my skin look like this colour?"
So we read the book and learned a lot of interesting things! Did you know everyone's skin is a 'shade' of brown? Did you know that your skin colour comes from your parents? Did you know everyone has tiny bits of colour in their skin, called 'melanin'? We learned that people with lighter-brown skin have melanin that is less 'busy', and people with darker-brown skin have melanin that is more active. Melanin helps protect skin from sunburns. Sometimes, the sun can change the colour of your skin.
During outdoor learning time the next day, we sat in a circle and discussed that at various times and in various places (including Canada), people are or have been treated unfairly because of the colour of their skin. In our class, we regularly and intentionally talk about ways we are similar and different from the friends in our class, and we appreciate our differences. So we asked the kids to consider how they might feel if someone who was 'the boss' told them they could not be friends with or do the same things as someone whose skin was a different colour than theirs, and what they would say about that if they were a helper who wanted to make things better. They shared beautiful, wise responses.
One day, a student said, “All my Beyblades are different colours. I want to make a Beyblade store!” He added a Beyblade store to the ‘colourful shop’, and - although we didn’t know it yet - that was the spark for an incredible new inquiry…a Beyblade inquiry! More stories about that in a future post.
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