Aims

The aim of the activity is to develop awareness of linguistic diversity by referring to a semantic field (i.e. colors) which children are very familiar with.

Connections to the curriculum:

- The activity can involve all foreign languages being studied (eg English, French, Spanish, ...) in the classroom.

How to:

Colors are a sort of "continuum", in fact, they can be put near each other gradually: a shade of green can switch to yellow, orange and so on. Different languages have words that "cut out" portions of meaning differently: for example, while in Italian we distinguish between blu and azzurro, in English there is only one word, blue.

Given a spectrum of colors (graphically represented, eg in one of the following ways), children associate the color name in their mother tongue to color gradations.

For example, an Italian child will make a similar division to the one shown below.

The children compare the outcomes in different languages and discuss how each language "differentiates" between colors.