Color Mixing, Two Ways

I usually only let J paint with one color at a time, because I'm mean like that, but I decided it was time to start expanding our palette. This also allows for mastery of color mixing facts, which always seemed to me to be the key to preschool science LOL. :)

First we did yellow and blue paint on Jackson's easel...

And then I set up this Pinterest-inspired activity, wherein the kiddo spoons colored dilute vinegar onto baking soda. It's colorful and fizzy! This kept him occupied for an incredibly long time, until all the fizz was gone and everything in all three containers was green.

How Do You Tell If a Toddler Is Color Blind?

Blame Mayim Bialik. I read her blog faithfully, and last year she posted that her six-year-old boy is color blind and that she missed the signs. Ever since I've been On Alert for color blindness. I'm not pushing colors as a general rule, but I won't lie, I was happy to find that BabyCenter topic assuring me that any given kid without a family history of color blindness is in all likelihood not color-blind, he's just not developmentally there yet.

Anyway, I swear I'm more than happy to do colors by osmosis, but Mayim's cautionary tale has been Haunting Me. Happily, the Internet is prepared for this contingency!

I found a site offering a special (free, hallelujah) color blindness test for children and toddlers. Kids need different tests than adults, because the traditional Ishihara color perception tests for color blindness (plate one is pictured above) are based on identifying a number hidden a field of colored dots. Kids who don't know their numbers yet would be confounded by this, regardless of their color perception.

The kid's color blindness test (which apparently originally appeared in Field & Stream magazine) has a bunch of cute little animals, and Jackson found the bear, the deer-cow and the bunny with no problem, so we're almost certainly in the clear. Yay!

Museum Colors, Gisela Voss

I love Museum Shapes (bought used) and Museum 123 (library), so I ordered Museum ABC and Museum Colors online. I was expecting to get the Metropolitan Museum of Art-published Museum Colors book with the same cover pictured on Amazon and the Met site, but instead I got a very interesting board book with the same title, published by the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1993, authorship credited to Gisela Voss, sometimes listed as Gi Voss. (As far as I can tell the Met book doesn't have a named author.) I think the Amazon listing has the two books conflated. Anyway, here are some selections from the Boston book in case you like fine art-based concept books as much as I do. I'll be interested to see what's in the Met book when it eventually wanders into my life!

Museum Colors by Gisela Voss, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1993; front cover and stair-step colored pages.

Museum Colors - Tom Browne, Two of Holland's

Museum Colors - Joseph Boze, Portrait of Two Boys

Museum Colors - Ito Jakuchu, Cockatoo

Museum Colors - Donald Oenslager, Off the Ballroom of the Windsor Hotel

Museum Colors by Gisela Voss, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1993; back cover.

Further Reading: Little-Kid Concept Books That Use Fine Art; Lucy Micklethwiat Bibliography