Colored Letters

My daughter and her class did a drive-by parade today to say goodbye to their second-grade teacher.  The children were making banners to wave from their cars and then give to their teacher as they passed her in her driveway.  

I had come up with an idea my daughter could do easily and successfully this morning that would still be readable by her teacher: I would print out thick block letters with her message, "you will always be in my heart" and then her name.   She would then color over it all, not having to worry where the letters were.  

Things went awry with her having a bad stomach ache that went on for a good bit of the morning so she never got the poster colored, but I asked her before I printed if she wanted her name in any particular color.   She did.

She wanted each letter a specific color—a very specific color that she had pictured in her mind's eye that she associated with that particular letter.   We went through all the letters in "Love Reese" and I made a mental note to come back later for more alphabetic color information.

Just before writing this, I talked to her and got colors for the rest of the alphabet.  And to make sure she wasn't making them up on the fly, I let her tell me the letters from earlier without any reminders.   She got them all exactly right.

These weren't any colors, mind you, these were very specific.  Like, "You know the color orange when you're looking at a pumpkin that has the candle lit inside it?   That's what it looks like."  There were sky blue and chocolate brown, coral and dark coral as well as some basic ones like dark blue.

I had a heck of a time getting some of them though.   Especially when she would say, "with a tinge of white" which she said several times.   She had a lot in the orange, yellow, and yellow-orange family which to her were all distinct, but caused me to go back and revise earlier letters when we got further into the alphabet.

There were several purples that were dark.   She said to me after one letter, "I'm really, really, really sorry here...but do you have an even darker purple?"  I got a break with the letter T as it was white.  "plain white?" I asked her, expecting there to be qualifications, but no, it was just white.  And then there was Y, which she said was, "yacht yellow".  Upon asking for more details I got, "A flag, any kind of flag that would be yellow.  Like that...but darker."  I asked her if it was sort of a dirty yellow, hopeful because I was running out of distinct yellows and was glad when she said, "yes, exactly like a dirty yellow!"



The Big Boy Update:  My son was watching what was clearly a baby television show today.   They had one episode for each of the numbers.   There were cartoons, songs and dancing.   I asked him why he was watching it as opposed to some of his other, preferred shows like Power Rangers.  He didn't know, but he showed me there were five seasons of the episodes.   I came out later and he was still watching, now all the way up to the number 100.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter had told me earlier her numbers had colors too, but I think wanted to be done with me tonight, saying, "Numbers are my secret.   I mean, I could tell you cocolate brown is number nine...but a lot darker."  Then she laughed at me because she knew that was  going to be a tricky color to find,