Colours of the World

In the middle of yet another exciting summer camp with kids in Bangalore. Our theme for the first session is 'water world'. So in class today, i decide to tell them a story about a little duck called Davy who decides to follow the migrating swallows and has a little adventure on his own. Although he feels that he has crossed the ocean and the desert and the mountains and reached the warm plains, he actually has just gone a little distance away from his little pond in the woods. The story ends with him getting saved from being devoured by a cat just in time by his mommy who had come looking for him.

At the end of the story, we decided to colour a picture of mamma and baby duck swimming happily in the pond. We have a few common 3-4 sets of crayons that is shared by the batch. Before i could say, alright let's begin, there was this wild scramble for the yellow crayon. EVERYONE wanted to colour the baby and mamma duck yellow. Now i for one have never seen a yellow duck (except of course Davy in the story!)

So here's what was the perfectly coloured picture of a duck for the kids:

(Obviously by the kid who managed to actually find the yellow crayon in the box!)

Not wanting to miss this learning opportunity, i got the children to talk about different birds that they might have seen and how all birds are differently coloured. We then talked about ducks. Just the previous day, some kids had got a duck picture for their show & tell and we discussed how there actually could b different colours on the duck. And post this little talk, besides stopping the fight for the evasive yellow crayon, here's what i got:



Quite happy with the results, i started to get the kids to close the activity, put things back in place and get ready for home, when little Aditi walks upto me and says, 'vijji, i think the baby duck's got to be yellow....but who says the water HAS TO BE blue??" And here's what her picture looked like:



Well, actually when was the last time i saw blue water anyway?!!