The magic of colours

Today is the third Thursday in March when Shelley goes to teach English to mothers whose children go to or went to a High School in Komaba. She spends part of the afternoon reading in English, answering questions, asking questions together with a Tsuji sensei. This is why once a month on a Thursday you will receive the journal earlier than usual. We did some more painting and magic drawing with white pastels and crayons and William L spent a lot of time working on his, planning his drawing and then working out where to draw on his page. It was challenging for him and for all of us to see what we were drawing with a white pastel or crayon on white paper; however we loved the surprise of seeing our drawings appear when we painted over them. He was busy playing in the dress up corner, wearing an astronaut suit when Shelley called him to come to the painting table. You can see the colour of the suit sticking out from underneath his art smock.

We completed some of our thank you cards which we made for our parents who came to teach us during International Month. Hisami is really creative and she tries to make interesting shaped cards with pop up things inside them. We are ready to give Tanaka sensei his card on Monday, as it is his last lesson with us. We think that he will enjoy receiving a card from us and it will help him remember us, because all of our photos are inside it.

We have been doing a few science experiments lately and today’s one was amazing. We all sat together at the large activity table and looked at white paper things called coffee filters. Some of us told our teachers that we have them at home but they are not white. We said that our mums and dads sometimes make coffee and put them inside a machine. Well, together with the coffee filters we had plastic cups, a cup with water in it and markers and a pencil. We counted 11 cups and then selected 11 colours viz. red, light blue, light green, yellow, orange, purple, dark blue, dark green, grey, brown and pink. Our teachers drew a line on each side of the coffee filter about a centimeter from the bottom and then wrote the name of the colour in pencil. We were not sure why they did this, because we could see the colours on each one.

Then we each poured some water into one of the plastic cups just so that we covered the bottom of the cup. Then we put the coffee filters into the cups only letting the tip at the bottom that was white, touch the water. And we watched…..we saw colours creeping up the coffee filter and we saw beautiful designs on some of them. Some of them had more than one colour creeping up the white filter. How was this happening? Why was this happening?

We saw that there was green and red on the brown filter; the dark blue one had red and blue in it; the orange one had yellow in it etc. We know that you mix yellow and red to make orange paint but we were surprised to see the yellow coming out from the orange line that our teachers had drawn on the coffee filter. We left the cups on the table during snack time so that we could observe them and make comments. William L said: “It’s magic!” We did not have enough time to discuss our observations because we were eating snack and we are so ritualized around what we do after each routine; as soon as we finished eating, we completed our chores and went to the library. The cups were left on the table while we went to the park. We are not sure what they will look like when we return. We will do this experiment again, adapting it slightly so that the entire coffee filter is covered in colour. The example that our teachers found on the internet are with much smaller ones. We are planning to take them out of the water to dry and use them for another activity.

You can see from some of the photos here in this journal how much we love dressing up. Our teachers always say that when we are playing imaginatively like this, it is the perfect time for them to observe us. They look at our social skills; at how we interact with one another; at our co-operative skills; at our choice of clothing and accessories etc. Some of us like to take the same thing every day and wear it or use it.

Thanks for a wonderful day of science, colours, learning and fun.

Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel