Colouring mixing bunnies

What better way to start our blog than with a book about mixing primary colours. Both S and A have adorable toy bunnies which live in their beds and are firm favourites at night time, so the book "White Rabbit's Colour Book" by Alan Baker  (ISBN 1-85697-399-9) was an instant hit.

We shared this book whilst on holiday in France and so had limited resources at our disposal for exploring the ideas.

We started by making some cloth white rabbits using a pillow case which was a couple of euro from the local store.

S helped tie the knots to form the rabbit's body, head and ears and A was handy with the scissors cutting off loose ends. If we had been at home we would have probably sewn the fabric together and stuffed the toys or even used the hot glue.

The book follows what happens as the inquisitive white rabbit explores three bowls of paint, red, blue and yellow.

We mixed up a cornflour paint using  2 cups of cornflour, 1 cup of cold water and 2 cups of boiling water. This makes a white base into which we added liquid food colouring. On this occasion our red looked rather pinky but it opened up some good discussions about how white can change a colour.

Then it was time for our rabbits to take a dip.

First sunshine yellow...

Then red...

To make an orange rabbit.

Rabbit then takes a wash in the shower to bring him back to white. Papa invented an effective shower using a plastic water bottle and we continued.

Hot red...

Cool blue...

To make purple.

After another shower we tried cold blue...

And warm yellow...

To make green.

But this time rabbit runs out of water and all that is left is the red paint.

Luckily green rabbit in red paint makes a beautiful brown rabbit - perfect!

There was lots of excitement and anticipation as rabbit explored each bowl, even though the boys had shared the book and knew what was coming up. For A, at two years,  it was a lot about colour identification but S (4 years) asked lots of questions and talked about the different shades, how it changed the more rabbit dived in and what would happen if further colours were mixed. Whilst having dinner outside later that day, Seb looked up at the washing on the line and said "I wonder what it would make if we mixed red and blue and green" looking at the colours of clothes hanging on the line - we'll just have to use our bunnies to find out!