The Colors Are Dancing!

By Kristin Sanderson

by Marisa Campbell and Celia Cruz, Nursery teachers

Have you heard about The After Cleanup-Time Freeze Dance? It’s another opportunity for our learners to demonstrate how our bodies move in so many ways. In between each “freeze,” we might see kitties crawling, a few friends twirling, snakes slithering, clapping and tapping, and of course, more twirling. The freeze dance always provides a sense of surprise as the dancers wait in their frozen positions for the next melody to begin. What kinds of sounds will we hear next? How will we move to the sounds and the beats?

And perhaps you’ve heard about the Color Dance. Before we began the second step of painting our life-size body drawings, we read Color Dance, by Ann Jonas, to help us think about how colors “dance” together to make new colors. We’re discovering that Ann Jonas, like her husband Donald Crews and her daughter Nina Crews, likes to tell a good story using vivid images in her own special way. In this storybook, children with scarves of primary colors dance together, while the scarves float in the air and mix and overlap to form new colors. After observing newly formed hues, our group of learners discussed what colors they might need for adding elements to their life-size likenesses. What colors do we need for clothing, faces, hair, shoes…and more? 

During Inquiry, they mixed colors in small cups, analyzed the newly created colors, compared the shades to the color wheel, and explored the effects of adding lighter or darker paint to the blends.  Continue reading.

 

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