Blue and Indigo

On Thursday 15th April, we thought about blue and indigo. There were relatively few families this week (only sixteen families), with several regular families absent through illness or holidays, but it's difficult to say if fewer people or the colours blue and indigo were the cause of the calm feeling. The blue display was magnificent with clothing, artwork and photos as well as a very imaginative display of blue food including blueberries, blue corn tortilla chips and blue Smarties.

We started with Heath's poem as he was desperate to read it out:

Blue by Heath

Blue is nice and blue is fun,
Blue is blueberries
And blue is really, really nice.
It's a lovely colour.
The end.

Freya's poem was also a song and she sang it for us:

Blue by Freya

You want to go out when the sky is blue,
But stay in when the clouds are blue.
Blue is calm and blue is fun,
Blue is bright and blue is dark.
So, come on and sing about blue, do!
Blue is in the rainbow.

And this was Amy's poem on blue:

What is life? By Amy

Our bodies are an ocean
and our tear drops are sea water.
In the end we die of stress,
stress of having to keep the damp gold fish alive
stress of failure to find love,
to be happy, to even force a sort of smile,
and you can hear that unloving voice saying
"you failed the world, John, Amy," and who ever else,
but our names are just plankton floating in our ocean bodies.

Blue made people think of a wide variety of things. Hana said that blue was her favourite colour and the blue display made her want to just dive in and disappear. For Daragh, blue made him think of a Dalek's spots. Lots of people thought of the sea and the sky when they thought of blue.

We also thought of blue football strips, such as Italy and Chelsea, as well as Thomas the Tank Engine who is blue. Heath had brought a blue kaleidoscope to show.

Heath thought that blue was a calm colour and it helped him to go to sleep and Freya agreed. Yahya said that blue made him think of going to Italy and going in the sea in swimming trunks. Amy said that blue reminded her of spirals but wasn't sure why, which was interesting as in many ancient cultural symbols, spirals and swirls represent water.

Emmie-Mae had brought in her Barbies Hadley and Delia, all dressed in blue and Emmie-Mae herself had a blue princess gown on. Lois had brought in some Mr Men books showing blue Mr Men, including Mr Bump. Jonathan had brought in a book about the blue whale.

We discussed blue foods and noted that there weren't that many of them – blueberries, plums, blue grapes, blue potatoes, blue corn and blue cheeses. There are many more blue flowers though including bluebells, and blue animals include peacocks, dragonflies and butterflies, as well as whales. There are also quite a few jewels which are blue including sapphires, blue diamonds, blue topazes and ultramarines.

A suggestion of amethysts led us on to indigo and trying to define it. It turned out that many of us had very different ideas as what indigo actually meant. Some of us thoughts indigo was merely a shade of blue while others thought it was actually an individual colour. Most people either seemed to think it was a navy blue, or a bit more purply than that.

Jae told us about how the dye indigo is used in the manufacture of jeans.

We then moved on to blue activities – Frances had brought blue play dough and Sinead showed the experiment where different foods were tested with iodine and those which contain carbohydrate turn blue. We also made giant seascapes with blue paint and materials and blue junk modelling.