After working within the concept of Papatuanuku’s Atelier for several months, the children’s interest in creating their own palettes of colour from natural materials is still of huge interest and intrigue.
So when the children decided one-morning tea to look at creating their own orange paint from the leftover orange peel it was of no surprise.
The children politely asked our chef for any leftovers she may have had and were pleasantly surprised to receive a varied assortment of orange offcuts.
They experimented with cutting, squeezing, grinding and grating these fresh oranges eager to see what would eventuate.
Over time some of the orange offcuts were left untouched and started to dry out. This offered the children another avenue for exploration as they tested out using the same tools that they had previously used with the fresh fruit pieces.
These tools didn’t seem to work so well, so Kenzo decided to use the mortar and pestle, that were familiar to the children from a previous investigation, as this would be a better choice. So he eagerly introduced this idea to his friends.
Breaking up and the process of pulverising started and to different degrees, the dehydrated orange was transformed into pieces.
The next stage of creating their paint was to add water to their ground orange pieces either slowly through a carefully manipulated dropper or by pouring in a larger amount.
Different tones of orange were created and further discussion was had whilst the children compared the results and how they had eventuated
