Exploring nature through colour

Heather Goodey is a teacher and NZASE Science Communicator. In this video, Heather unpacks an activity she has used with a range of students to support their capability to observe closely.

Transcript

Heather Goodey

Welcome. I just want to share with you a little activity that I put together, and I’ve called it exploring nature through colour.

The school that I was working at, we’d already covered energy and then we’d looked at light and shadows and then we were moving on to nature and colour.

And our big question was, why are pōhutukawa flowers red? But I see this as just something that you could do as a stand-alone lesson.

We spent some time in the classroom first of all looking at what an observational drawing might look like and comparing it to a drawing that we might do for art.

To start off with, we coloured in the worksheet. We got each of the little crayons, we used our colouring-in pencils and coloured those in.

I did that with all the different year groups, and with the juniors, we also played the te reo song, the colour song.

I defined that we’re going to be looking for natural things that represent each colour, and for some colours, that can be quite tricky.

And it was really about using those colours to force them into looking even harder, not just for the obvious yellow of the buttercup, but actually sort of getting into what exactly could I define as red or what looks pink?

We didn’t kill anything, so there was no picking bark off or pulling leaves off the trees. So it was really just about sitting down with the class and having that discussion before we went outside about respecting nature and that we are going to use our eyes to look.

But when it came to the bugs and other things that they found, I had a few containers and so we did move a few things into those to be able to look at them a little bit easier without them escaping.

I asked some questions to encourage some deep looking so, like I said, having a few magnifying glasses and some containers could be helpful.

With my juniors, it was actually raining the day when we went to do this. So instead of going outside, we looked at our brain snacks and we had lots of fruit and vegetables.

I did this activity in spring, so there was strawberries and kiwifruit and orange. It was just amazing when they started looking at all the little segments within the segments of the orange and counting the seeds on their slice of kiwifruit.

Looking at bark, lichen, grass in detail – it’s just a way of getting them to look a bit more.

And just make sure that you work with your class to define what it is that you will or won’t include.

So we were very clear that it did not include the blue rubbish bins or the concrete or the sky or clouds or each other, and we also cut out birds that were flying away, but we allowed insects that were nearby even if they could fly away.

So very much an activity that you can use in any way you like.

Acknowledgements

The Science Learning Hub Pokapū Akoranga Pūtaiao acknowledges the contribution of Heather Goodey and the New Zealand Association of Primary Science Educators (NZAPSE) in making this video.