What if we lived in a world without color?

Swift 2nd graders pondered this question, and then came up with responses such as “It would be boring,” “It would be sad,” and “Artists wouldn’t be able to have any fun!”

In Ms. Pendola’s class, several students were out for ACCESS testing, so I read from Rob Gonsalves’ book Imagine a World and students looked closely to see how the illustrations played tricks with our eyes: goldfish -orange leaves on trees turned into monarch butterflies and buildings with windows became faces with wide-open eyes and mouths! We also looked at images of brightly-colored quilts made by the artist, Bisa Butler. We wrote a color poem as a group, which we will revise as a group at a later date. In Ms. Brist’s class, we read Shel Silverstein’s poem, “Colors,” in which he describes his skin as being “brownish pinkish yellowish white;” with eyes that are “greyish blueish green,/ But I’m told they look orange in the night.” We all put our hands in a hub to notice the range of browns, tans, creams, and pinks among us, before brainstorming ideas for color poems that we will continue to work on next week.