The Orange Session

The session on Thursday 11th March explored the colour orange. We discussed that there are no rhymes for 'orange', and Samia and Yahya had written a poem/song on this subject entitled No Words (*see end for Samia's account of writing it, and for the song itself). Freya had brought the book Amber The Orange Fairy by Daisy Meadows to show and also read the poem Today, In Strong Colours by Sue Cowling. Emmie-Mae had brought a book on the rainbow. Lois had made a paper model of Mr Tickle and also a book of another orange Mr Man - Mr Topsy-Turvy.

We also had a fantastic wall of orange fabrics, papers, artwork (including a fabulous tiger by Harrison) and gold leaf, and a table full of orange foods including peach, mango, oranges, carrots (which can also be purple and white), jelly, marmalade, and Double Gloucester cheese. Hannah and Katriona noticed that the orange that people had in their homes was mainly on walls or furnishings, such as sofas.

We discussed which oranges can be found in nature, such as autumn leaf colours, tropical fish, tigers, tropical birds, and butterflies. Max had been very excited to learn this week that scientists have found a piece of preserved dinosaur skin which had orange and white stripes on it.

We also talked about volcanoes, lava and fire being orange and how in that case, the colour was associated with heat.

In the man-made world, there are orange toy cars, there was an orange Mini made in the 1970s, American prisoners who we have seen on TV wear orange jumpsuits in order to stand out if they escape, and orange is the USA's second highest terrorist risk alert. Orange means amber - a warning light.

The word 'orange' comes from a Spanish word and was derived originally from Sanskrit, an ancient Indian language. The colour orange is still important to Hindus today, and we observed a gorgeous sari which Rachel had brought in. Orange was first used in English by King Henry VIII. Coincidentally, both Henry VIII and his daughter Elizabeth I had red/orange hair, which was a Tudor family trait. Red/auburn hair is a recessive gene and so over time becomes less common.

Other man-made items which are orange include space hoppers, workmen's safety clothing, and toy guns which have orange at the end of the barrel to indicate to police officers that they are toy guns and not real ones.

There are quite a few political parties which use the colour orange, especially ones which want to demonstrate that they are new and different.

We mentioned that many animals are colour blind and so wouldn't be able to see the colour orange.

The children also associated the colour orange with: confidence, courage, creativity, happiness, and bouncy-ness.

The family who are following our Project at a distance, continued their bird theme and found the Andean 'Cock of the Rocks' which they say is really, really orange! There's also the orange headed ground thrush which is from Asia and lives in forests, especially dense understorey, often in bamboo thickets and near running water; the orange faced Australian cinnamon and Orange Canaries, both of which are captive-bred colour variations.

After the brainstorming session, we launched into our orange activities. Firstly we had a competition to decide who had the most orange hair - Hannah or Tabitha. Hannah won with 16 votes to Tabitha's 10 (everyone else abstained!) but Tabitha demands a recount on a sunny day!

We also compared the colour of carrot juice and orange juice, noting that carrot juice was much darker in colour than we'd expected. There were paper lanterns to make, with orange tissue paper to put inside to represent a flame.

By far the most popular activity was Sharpie pen dyeing, in which we drew with coloured marker pens on pieces of white fabric, then dripped alcohol onto the drawing and let it spread and bleed the colours before drying them on the radiator to 'fix' the colour. This resulted in some beautiful patterns and colours.

Frances had made some orange play dough, which was not only orange in colour but orange in scent as well! As always, this went down very well with young and old alike.

Rachel did a survey on children's favourite colours and blue won hands-down. The full results were represented as a bar graph and the summary was:

pink 3
red 5
yellow 0
green 3
blue 7
orange 5
brown 0
black 4
purple 2
no preference/no answer 4

Rachel also surveyed the children on their thoughts on orange, how it made them feel and what it made them think of:

"Colourful" - Amy
"Orange" - Tommy
"Warm autumn" - Malcolm, who was also upset by the orange fence around the grassy area currently.
"Traffic cones" - Joe
"Orange colours" - Louis
"Orange" - Jake
"Orange juice" - Sophia
"The fence around the grass. Red and yellow" - Harrison
"Oranges" - Freya
"Oranges. Orange flowers" - Charlie
"Hot summers day. Orange ice lollies" - Yahya
"Fresh orange juice" - Hassan
"Lightly kind of red" - Emmie Mae


*Are There Any Words That Rhyme With Orange? by Yahya and Samia.

Orange is one of those words that famously has nothing perfectly to rhyme with it. The other one is silver. However, the Oxford Rhyming Dictionary does show both these words as having half-rhymes (such as lozenge with orange and salver with silver).
The principle of a half-rhyme in these cases is quite simple. Whereas a full and stressed rhyme (e.g. hand / stand) or even an unstressed rhyme (such as handing / standing) contain vowels that are common to both words, a half-rhyme like orange / lozenge or silver / salver (technically speaking, pararhymes) has obvious differences between vowels in certain syllables.

This humorous ditty is sung in 2 parts deep and loud and high and sweet! Yahya and I created it this morning after eating our breakfast wearing our orange outfits! I ate apricot jam on toast – because it was orange!

There are no words that sound like orange
so we will not even try!
To find a word that rhymes with orange
could make us mad before we die

So we came up with several words
none of them make sense at all
we wrote them down into this song
we shall now sing them to you all

Orange – borange, corange, dorange,
forange, gorange, horange, jorange,
lorange, morange, norange, porange,
quorange, rorange, sorange, torange,
vorange, woarange, xorange, yorange & zorange

Could someone please give us a lozenge?