Just a couple of weeks ago our world was mostly white thanks to a very early snowstorm. I was looking forward to the snow melting, not only because that much snow in September is ridiculous, but because I wanted to take my kids on a colour walk and figured it would be more fun without quite so much snow.
Eventually the snow did melt and we found some extra time on a beautiful, sunny fall afternoon, so out we went. (The colour walk idea, incidentally, came from a post on Radiolab, which is a podcast I’ve recently started listening to, and which I love. The colour walk instructions seemed fairly loose, so we just went with it and embraced a six-year-old’s approach, which involved some random changing of colour choices as we walked.)
My older son wanted to start by heading towards this car.
Orangey-red, he called it, and I thought we might have a bit of trouble finding many other things in that colour but I was (quite happily) mistaken.
Like a tree, which we noticed behind us, so we did an about-face and walked in that direction.
Then there was a path tucked between two houses, and when we looked down it we saw a post at the end with an orangey-red colour on the top.
And beyond that, a garage door.
We had two options then – turn left or go straight. A peek down the street revealed a driveway lined with potted plants, so we chose straight and went towards the orangey-red pots.
Just beyond that house was another with flowers in a pink that popped and caught my son’s eye…
…so we abandoned red and started looking for pink things.
Like this watering can, found on a driveway down the road.
And some colourful drawings in sidewalk chalk.
We looked at all the colours on that artistic driveway, but then a blue orb caught our eye. It was decoration in a garden and it was, to a six-year-old, very cool. Blue was our next colour.
We walked past the house with the blue orb and in the direction of a blue bucket abandoned on a lawn. Then we turned a corner towards a blue recycling bin outside a house. When we got to an intersection, we had to peer around to find the next blue thing.
We spotted a blue air freshener in a car not far away, so that decided it. That way!
That turned out to be a good choice, because there was a lot of blue to follow. Instead of turning left we chose straight again to head towards a house with a blue trampoline and continued on past a blue truck.
After that we had a decision to make again: straight, left, right, or across a field. On the other side of the field was a townhouse complex with a colourful sign outside, and that seemed like an appropriate place to stop since it was a bunch of colours in one spot (and there was a place to get ice cream just beyond it).
By following colours we had walked in several loops and noticed more in our environment than I had imagined would be there. There was graffiti on a fence and blue survey markings on driveways. The leaves in the trees are changing and we could have followed yellow in any number of directions. And there was more pink than I thought we’d see too.
All in all, this activity was a blast and something I’d like to try in all seasons. It would be an adventure even with snow on the ground, I’m sure.
