Basing children’s learning on content that can be experienced first-hand guarantees a measure of meaning. Children are not asked to gain knowledge second-hand, by listening to someone else tell them about primary and secondary colours .Rather, children are involved in touching, taking apart, tasting, and smelling things in their here-and-now world. By doing so, they are the ones who are receiving information directly and making sense of it.
Piaget’s work fully documented that first-hand experiences are necessary if children are to learn, think, and construct knowledge (Piaget & Inhelder, 1969). When children actually handle objects in their environment, they gain knowledge of the physical properties of the world in which they live. As they experimented with the colours of nature, they saw how the beetroot, spinach and turmeric gave their colours for them to draw.
Through first-hand experiences, children have the opportunity to confirm or change their ideas about how colour combination worked and what they can do with these colours in their world. These initial, often incomplete and tentative, hypotheses and schemes about colours are the foundation on which all subsequent learning is built.
Then we passed on to poster paint and transparent A4 envelopes. This time they had the opportunity to see how colours merged and created different nuances.
Hope this is the humble beginning of a long series of experiments that our children will enjoy making at school or at home.
Sylvia Bettaglio (English teacher)
