Coloured Paper

The basic craft supplies are always available for the children to use independently throughout the day – pencils, crayons, chalk, scissors, glue, tape, rulers, magazines and various types of paper. The children’s choice of paper is something that I find interesting.  The current school-age children go through vast amounts of plain white paper, cutting pieces and gluing/taping them together to create books, masks etc.  They seem to have no interest in the coloured paper or adding colour to their projects – unless there is paint.

The school-age children I had here for the summer preferred to use the lined paper.  They created impressive stories and art work filling every space on one paper before selecting another piece of lined paper.  They never chose plain white paper or coloured paper.

For the preschoolers paper choice is a major decision often taking more time than anything that they add to the paper.  Coloured paper has been their favourite ever since I showed them that the white pencils/crayons were not ‘broken’, but you could only see them on darker paper. If several of the preschoolers are at the table at the same time the paper choice process takes even longer since they often rethink their colour choice if the others pick a different colour.

Every time I restock the coloured paper the selection process is the same.  Pink paper is always the first choice and when all the pink paper is gone they will choose purple.  After that the decisions get more difficult – light blue, dark blue, red or black get used up next but they definitely are not the preferred colour choices.  In fact, after the pink and purple are gone they often choose plain white or lined paper over the other coloured paper.

Eventually the stack of coloured paper contains only yellow, orange, green, and brown.  The preschoolers will occasionally use these colours but they never seem pleased about it.  So, as the sad looking four year old sighed and reluctantly picked a yellow paper from the dwindling pile I asked  “Why don’t you like these colours?”  She replied “I like them but they are your favourites.”

?!?!?!


Yes, they are.  Throughout all our activities we often discuss favourite colours as well as other likes & dislikes but until she mentioned it I had never even noticed that the ‘leftover’ paper pile contained all my favourite colours.  Awww, all this time have they been leaving those papers for me?  I always thought they picked pink and purple first because they liked those colours best but now I’m wondering if they chose them because they know I don’t like pink and purple. 

They’re very perceptive.

Stacking Order

A few weeks ago I bought a new toy from Ikea – I love that none of their toys have any connection to movies/TV shows.  Actually, I bought a few toys but only this one has been introduced into the playroom so far.

Yes, we already have a lot of stacking toys but they are not all out at the same time and each has something that makes it a little different from the others.  This one is a ‘lighthouse’ – the older children recognized it right away.  The toddlers don’t know what a lighthouse is so they just think that top blue piece is in the wrong spot. They prefer to put it like this;

 

Matching it with the other blue one – they don’t care that it doesn’t have an outer tapered edge, colour is more important.

I like the colours too.  Finally a toy that has all the primary and secondary colours and arranges them in colour mixing order – green between yellow and blue, purple between red and blue.  Last year I wrote Colour Hunt about how some colours are left out.

I also like that this stacking toy allows the children to try other arrangements too.  Some stacking rings have a tapered center post which makes it impossible to put the rings on in reverse order.  The younger children get frustrated when they can’t push the smaller rings to bottom of the post.
The older children enjoy arranging this toy ‘backward’ or ‘upside down’.  These are some of the patterns they’ve made with this new toy;

So many options from one simple toy.  I wonder how many more they can discover.

Rainbow Sorting

It was just over two weeks ago that I changed the blocks in the playroom.  I put the heavy wooden blocks back into storage and brought out the Duplo blocks.  I also put away the big trucks that were in the block area and brought out the coloured baskets.

We’ve used these baskets for sorting colours before and because the Duplo blocks are so brightly coloured I thought the children may be interested in sorting the blocks into the baskets.  I place the baskets under the block bin and as I was putting the new blocks in the block bin I sorted them by color above the corresponding basket.

Originally I did it ‘just for fun’.  Organizing stuff  is ‘my thing’, the little ones are usually more interested in ‘reorganizing’ but I was curious to see how long it would remain like this.  It wasn’t until I finished getting everything put away that I realized that if I had put the purple bin and miscellaneous blocks on the left side it would have been the correct rainbow colour order.  I just left it that way instead.

The next day when the first children arrived I did ask them to but the blocks away in the ‘correct’ order when they were finished playing with them.  These two school-age children are here earlier than the little ones and sometimes they have already left for school before all the preschoolers arrive.  I wanted the little ones to have the opportunity to see this particular setup.

Interestingly, two weeks later the blocks still look like this.  The younger children don’t tend to take out many blocks at one time and at clean-up time they have been able to put the majority of their blocks in the appropriate section.  The older children and I have been moving the occasional mismatched blocks and repairing the blurred lines between the sections.

The older children actually seem to like having the blocks organized.  They are the ones who are most particular about colour when they are choosing blocks for their creations.  Having the blocks organized by colour means they don’t need to spend so much time searching for the blocks they want.
I’ve also taken this opportunity to get some ‘rainbow’ and colour themed books from the library;

These are our two favourites.  There are few words and plenty of pictures to keep the little ones interested.  I like the nature themes too;

Can’t wait until there is more colour outside – we’re getting tired of just white and grey and looking forward to rainbows and colour outside as well as inside.