My Favourite Colour

In a classroom, a teacher asks the question, “What’s your favourite colour?”, and the book’s unnamed central character immediately responds by raising her hand, naming the colour blue while adding a brief explanation for her colour choice. However, she quickly has second thoughts and identifies orange as really being her favourite colour because it evokes images of autumn. Once again, however, she rethinks her favourite colour choice and then selects black. And so the pattern continues as the little girl, in turn, chooses red, yellow, green, white, purple, brown and pink as each being her favourite colour before concluding, “I can’t choose only one”/They’re all so very special, picking favourites can’t be done!” The teacher agrees, adding, “Like a rainbow in the sky, no shade is better than the rest.” The closing spread, featuring six children of different races, is accompanied by the teacher’s social affirmation:

”And just like all of you,
who fill this world with light,
every colour of the rainbow
is beautiful and bright.”

The contents of each of Bryanna Chapeskie’s spreads feature various items that reflect the little girl’s most recent favourite colour choice. For example, “green” finds the little girl in a garden tending to a variety of green vegetables and flowers, with the plant life exhibiting various shades of green. When the child reader/listener is comfortable in identifying the various individual colours, the adult facilitator could return to some of these spreads and have the child name some of the other colours found on the two pages. “Green” is an excellent example because Chapeskie has included red and yellow flowers, an orange trellis, a white shirt, a pink watering can, black earth and purplish rocks. The only weakness in My Favourite Colour may be due to a printing challenge as much of the “orange” pages reads red while the “yellow” pages have an orange feel to them.

The repeating pattern of Lindsay Ruck’s rhyming text in her concept book, My Favourite Colour, a invites post-reading conversation, with the adult reader perhaps beginning with asking the child listener to share her/his favourite colour and why before extending into other areas such as favourite foods or toys and why.