Along The Crooked Path: color reveal (and the Boy's seasons story)

Yesterday I read the boys "Color Painters" from the Enki Education 1st Grade Nature Story collection. It's a short but very visually rich story about how Red and Yellow paint the world in spring, but are then covered over by green, until he gathers his paint off the trees again in Autumn, when Red and Yellow shine again. For artistic digestion today, I wanted to do an "autumn reveal" (which I've also heard/read referred to as a "color reveal") picture. But although I've read mention of it in the Enki materials somewhere, I just couldn't seem to find a description of how to do it. Nor could I find anything but other confused parents when I searched the archives of the support group. So I fiddled around with my own ideas until I came up with something I felt confident would work for us. I'm going to go ahead and post about it in detail in case other Enki parents might like to do something similar with their kids.

We started with a lightly colored background (we used orange), just so we weren't facing a daunting big blank page. Then, with a brown block crayon, I led a gesture drawing of a tree trunk and branches, while reading the first two stanzas from the "Color Painters" verse (found with the story in the Nature Stories collection).

While I read the corresponding stanza of the verse, we colored small, dark ovals along the branches with red and yellow stick crayons, being sure to lay down as thick a layer of wax as possible on the page (otherwise the upcoming "magic" won't work). I did the same with a large red leaf and a large yellow leaf, because I was afraid that the "magic" wouldn't be obvious enough with the smaller leaves, but I really worried for nothing and just created more work for myself and the kids by doing something with a larger area like that, so if I were to do it again, I'd just stick with the smaller leaves on the tree.

We then took a green stick crayon and colored over all of the leaves with it as I read the stanzas about the Green Color Painter. (You can see the leaves on the left-hand branch of my tree are colored over with green.) We continued with green by bringing in some green grass beneath the tree with a green block crayon, while I continued to read the verse about how satisfied Green was with the whole world covered in green, and how Red and Yellow were biding their time until Autumn.

I then handed the kids dimes -- I'm sure there must be a better implement for this, but in playing around with what I had on hand, a dime seemed to work best. I showed them by example how to scratch the green off of the leaves, and they eagerly set to work (uttering repeated phrases of amazement at this "magic"), while I read the lines about Green collecting his paint as it dripped from the leaves.

As the boys finished up their color revealing, I read the final lines of the verse, and then left them to embellish their drawings as they saw fit. I did not embellish mine, as by then the boys were totally sunken into the whole creation experience and didn't need any more guidance from me.

Both boys were eager to add the Color Painters to their drawings. This first is J's, you can see Red and Yellow with their paint brushes at the ready.

Zoo Boy's drawing. He drew in Green as well, and also added lines above Red and Yellow, claiming them to be Scarlet and Crimson (who only appear in the last line of the verse) streaking in to add their colors to the leaves as well. He also pointed out to me that Green's paintbrush holds brown as well as green paint. I asked him why that was, and he explained very matter-of-fact, "That's because he's getting ready to go to sleep."

Speaking of the Boy, after I told my story yesterday, he told his own story about the change of seasons. I sure wish I had thought to video tape it so I could save it the way he presented it. It was a WONDERFUL tale that started with Princess Spring taking over the world from King Winter and all the things the kids get to do because of that, and then "she has to go" (I loved that line....) and King Summer took over, which was great because he opened the lake and all the kids were happy because they could go swimming. ("I like to imagine King Summer watching the kids and smiling because he made them happy," he confided in me.) And then King Summer "had to go" and Duchess Autumn took over, and she closed the lake which made the kids sad, so to make them happy again she changed the leaves over to colors and made them drop from the trees. Then the kids raked them up and jumped in the piles they made and were happy again, which made Duchess Autumn smile. But then, of course, she "had to go" and along came King Winter again. And the kids were cold and unhappy, so King Winter called his friend Jack Frost and made snow for the kids to play in and go sledding on, and then they were happy and so was King Winter. But then King Winter had to go and it was Princess Spring's turn all over again.

Anyway, stories aside, we went for a leisurely walk this afternoon at the top of a local mountain. We strolled through the yellow forest, stopped at a cliff-side overlook (see the very first photo at the top of this post), and...