Develop Your Kids’ Power of Observation to Enhance Travel
When you start thinking about the world around you just in terms of color, it gets pretty exciting.
Explore the names of colors and the subtle differences in colors on different trips. Start to notice the difference of colors in different countries: the colors people wear, the colors of different cities, the colors of nature, the varied color of the sky, the changing colors of water, and sunsets, and sunrises.
A travel color log can be combined with a journal for photos and scribbles, even if the kids are young. Check out Western Traveling Mom Jennifer Close and her homemade Journal ideas. Observe food and other things / choose different categories that are color specific on your next trip. Get kids to point their “find” as it happens and describe the type of color (dark, light, pastel, etc). Have them keep score…
The list goes on, and I have practical suggestions to bring creativity and brain fitness into your travel plans to enhance your trips. Travel is a wonderful time for developing creativity because it is a special time and exciting place in our crazy, crazy lives, where we get to relax and laugh and explore things that are new and different, and perhaps challenging.
Relax and Breathe
Family travel is a wonderful opportunity to help jumpstart creativity in some very simple but unique ways. What a good time to get your kids to eat different colors! What a good time to get them to focus and explore without the school curriculum boxing them in! What a good time to S-L-O-W down and Breathe!
Let’s do a quick exercise. Travel with your travel color log. Take a deep breath. And another. That’s right, breathing is good and good for you. Suburban Traveling Mom Jamie Bartosch has a great Yoga break I recommend.
So take another breath and slowly look all around, and that includes above and below!
Don’t forget to squat and check out bugs, leaves and drops of water. Start listing the colors you observe. Write down every color you can see with a name or description which will help you begin to approach problems from a variety of directions, and help you think outside the box.
Red is More than One Color
For example, if you see something is red, think about what kind of red it is. Is it dark red? Is a rust or mulberry or maroon red? Could it be a fire engine or tomato red? You need to start developing your visual and verbal descriptive ability. Examine color wheels and color lists to get started.
I suggest you go to your local paint store or home-improvement store to their paint department, and get some paint chip books which use great names for colors. Or get a book out from the library. Or go online and search. Use your imagination.
You could take photos of the various red things you see, print them out and paste them into your travel color log. (Buy a book with blank sheets, preferably with a ring binding so it will expand easily when you paste things in it).
According to Wikipedia, the human eye can distinguish about 10 million different colors. Start exploring a few dozen of them with your kids and you will begin to see improvement in their observation skills, their interest in the colors around them, how they look at and think about food, and a whole new world will open up for them, and for you.
How many times have you begged, cajoled, promised the farm, argued, insisted, offered rewards, lied, or just plain lost it (Because I Said So, That’s Why!!), just to get your kids to eat some broccoli or OMG, taste new food?!
This is the tip of the iceberg. But you have to start somewhere and color is a very good place to start. When you start, you begin with ROY-G-BIV…(I was weaned on Sound of
Music…feel free to hum along…) Approach eating foods from a color perspective. And laugh as you do it. You might get some different, and amazing results!
Alli Berman is a Brain Fitness thru Creativity expert, educator, author, therapeutic art product developer and an exhibiting interactive installation artist who has traveled to over 15 countries with her kids (one deaf daughter, one perfectionist son!) for more than 25 years. Join her and explore adventure travel in the US and exotic locations mixed with Brain Fitness fun! This is your online destination for the best creativity and brain fitness tips and tricks, useful fun hands-on ideas and activities, packing lists to develop a more creative kid, educational and fun ideas, helpful advice and more…anything to help you and your kids develop a creative eye in order to explore and enjoy the world in a more creative, colorful and fully integrated way. The end result?…Happier, more relaxed moms AND their single to double digit traveling brood before, during and after an adventure. Join her!