Cabbages are green and a sandy beach is yellow – unless you are an artist, in which case you can make them whatever colour you like… Bob Gill’s classic picture-book What Colour Is Your World? (Phaidon, 2008) was originally published in 1962 and has lost nothing of its freshness and vitality in the intervening years.

The book starts with a question: “What color is the world?” and then

Suppose you asked a gardener? “Simple!” he would say, “My world is
green.”

(or ask a milkman, or a stargazer…). As you turn the pages, the black ink illustrations set against or filled in with the relevant block of colour are a feast for the eyes and a satisfying pattern emerges in the accompanying text… only to be turned on its head:

But suppose you asked an artist? “It’s hard to tell,” he would answer. “Colours keep changing. Look at this…”

The simplicity of this wonderful book is deceptive. Young children will revel in the direct speech (onomatopeias like Clunk! and Humph!) and delight in the topsy-turvy whimsy of the artist’s world, where the sky can be yellow and the ocean can be orange – and then they will look at their own world and play with the colours around them too.

There is also an interesting aside at the beginning: a note points out the British and American spelling of colour/ color, both of which are used here: “Neither is wrong nor right. They are just different ways of doing the same thing”. Hmmm, something tells me this message goes a little deeper!

This fun and engaging introduction to colors encourages young children to look at the world with their own eyes and imaginations, and probably also to ask everyone around them: what colour/color is your world? So, what colour is your world?

Posted by: Marjorie | This entry was posted on Sunday, February 22nd, 2009 at 4:54 pm and is filed under Reading Aloud. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Tags: Bob Gill, Phaidon, reading aloud to children, What Colour Is Your World?