Word Spark – Colours

Colours have the most amazing ability to invoke emotions and feelings and conjure up many different associations with the senses. 
Have a think about different colours: what would red taste like? Or blue? How about orange?  The association with ‘oranges’, I imagine, would be too strong for the colour to taste of anything but the fruit!

Imagine eating a blue carrot or orange celery!  See if you can find the book Green Eggs & Ham – a classic Dr Seuss fable that is a perfect lead into things that are just the ‘wrong’ colour!

See what research you can do online regarding foods and colours. For example, did you know that carrots were purple centuries ago? Try to google it! Or visit the Carrot Museum site (the source of our purple carrot image) here.

It would be a great time to get out the Dough Worx or Plasticine and experiment some modelling with a twist… Create models of items that are distinctly defined by their colour and play a bit of a charades game…as the item is being moulded, see if other people can guess what it is.  It will quickly become apparent how much we rely on the visual colour for identification of an item.

Use these models to create crazy stories of the ‘Green Eggs & Ham’ type, have some fun with it and encourage the use of outlandish, vibrant illustrations to go with the tale of colours turned topsy turvey.

Grab handfuls of just one colour of Dough Worx and have students model something that colour represents to them. For example, red could be fire, or a bad temper, blood, tomatoes or their favourite jumper… Whilst using the tactile aspect of the modelling, have students think about their colour and their object and share a descriptive talk with the class that explains the connection between the two.

Maybe you could have a colour dress up day to round off the topic…what’s your favourite colour and why?