Mockingbird

Use this activity to engage all types of learners, while requiring that they refer to and incorporate details from the text over the course of the activity.

Activity: “The Wonderful World of Color(s)”

In this activity, students exchange and color in black-and-white compositions to explore color’s relationship to emotion and empathy.

The novel tracks how Caitlin, a promising artist, comes to engage a world of color. In the beginning of the novel, she enjoys sketching things but only with her charcoal pencil. She avoids colors because they are confusing. In the end, however, she embraces colors and prepares to draw with crayons—a change that marks her broader emotional evolution.

• Create a picture using only black and white. Chose a subject in nature or maybe a city neighborhood with people and buildings. Make the sketch as careful and as detailed as you can, but do not use colors. Pretend for a moment you are Caitlin and look at the drawing you have completed. How would you describe that world of black and white? What does it share with a viewer? What does it lack?
• As a class, collect the sketches and then distribute them so that everyone ends up with someone else’s drawing. Study the sketch you’ve ended up with and decide where colors go and which colors go where. Do not worry over what the right color is; use crayons, colored pencils, markers, or some other medium to bring the sketch to life with lots of shades.
• Return the sketch to the original artist and share your ideas about how you colored in that world. Explain what each color meant and how it helped create a more animated and immediate scene. Ask your partner how they might have colored their sketch and discuss where there are differences or agreements, as well as how colors allow those levels of perception.

Teaching Suggestion: Students today have been shaped by visual media that is almost entirely in color. Caitlin’s black-and-white world may not register, in which case students will have difficulty understanding why color emerges as critical to Caitlin’s emotional growth. In this exercise, students can learn the value of color, the intensity it brings to the world, and how it creates nuance in the context of interpersonal connection; by discussing their interpretations of their classmates’ drawings, students can explore the relationship between color and The Power of Empathy in the novel.

Paired Text Extension: Read the Marge Piercy 2003 poem “Colors Passing Through Us.” What parallels do you see in this poem’s celebration of the wide array of colors in the world and how those colors allow us to see more clearly and to take delight in the world?

• Design a greeting card with the words from the poem, “Every day I will give you a color” (line 7). Let the card reflect the same joy that Caitlin feels as she slips off her shoes and settles down to draw the world as it is.

Teaching Suggestion: Consider tying this activity back to the topic of loss by asking the class to imagine how Piercy’s poem might fit a memorial service as a reminder not to let fear, anxiety, or depression destroy life.