🔮 Phase 1 - Anticipation 🗳️ Identification ⏱ 5 minutes

Activity 1 - Three Palettes

Three sets of five colours. No pictures. No names. Nothing to help you. One of them was taken from photographs of the place where you live. Which one is yours?

🔮 Mystery 🤫 Silence & Focus
Step 1 - Before we start
Three sets of five colours. No pictures. No names. One of them was taken from photographs of the place where you live. The other two are from somewhere else in Europe.
Which one is yours?
Step 2 - Which one is where you live?
Tap the palette you think is yours. No pressure - go with your first feeling.
Step 3 - The reveal
This class, so far
-
Most classes get this right. Comfortably. Which is strange, when you think about it. Nobody taught you the colours of your own town… You have simply looked at it every day since you were born, and somewhere in your head you kept a record.

So let us find out what is in that record.
Step 4 - Look out of the window
🪟
60
Look out of the window. Not at anything in particular - just out. You have sixty seconds and one job: count the colours. Not five names like red, green, blue. Count how many actually different colours you can find out there.
How many different colours did you get?
Step 5 - Hold that thought
Private · saved to your portfolio · up to 150 characters
Name one colour you see every day and have never thought about
There is no right answer. This is never marked or shown to the class.
🔒 Autosaves every few seconds as you type. You will see this exact sentence again at the end of Activity 6, editable.
0 / 150
✅ Saved to portfolio
Keep that thought. Now let's find out the five reasons a place has the colours it has.
"The colours were always there. You had just stopped seeing them. Today you are going to go and get them - starting with the five reasons they exist at all."
← Lesson Overview Continue to Encounter →

What happens in Activity 1

A 5-minute Phase 1 - Anticipation activity. Three palettes of five flat colour swatches each, one choice, then an instant class-percentage reveal (no individual result shown to anybody). Sixty silent seconds looking out of the window with one job - count the colours - then a single number field, no camera. A private journal entry (up to 150 chars), and three starting self-ratings you will see again, worded identically, at the end of Activity 7.

🎯 Learning objectives

Discover that a place has a recognisable palette. Notice how many colours are visible in one ordinary view. Record what you believe right now, before the lesson changes it.

🎨 On the palettes

The three palettes are generated from real photographs during setup in a live deployment - here they are represented as five flat-colour swatches with no texture and no label, matching the platform's real specification. The two decoys are plausible: one from a similarly warm, coastal climate, one clearly different, so the trick is never obvious. The window minute has no camera and no upload on purpose - adding a photo task here would replace looking with photographing, the opposite of the intention.

♿ SEN Adaptations
  • The window-minute timer can be switched off entirely from the accessibility profile - the skip button is always visible and never recorded as a failure
  • Voice-to-text input available for the journal entry
  • Full audio narration and captions for every written instruction
🖨️ No-Tech Format
  • Print-pack card 1 has the three palettes as printed colour strips with a tick box - the one screen in this lesson that must be printed in colour
  • The window minute needs no technology at all and works better without it
  • If there's no window or the view is a wall, use a projected photo of the school's own street - a wall is a perfectly good subject, usually with more colours than a landscape
Phase 1 · Anticipation · Identification
Activity 1 - Three Palettes
1Choice
3Ratings
5mDuration
Progress0%
1
Choose your palette
2
See the class result
3
Count the window colours
4
Write your journal entry
5
Rate where you're starting from
All Activities - Lesson 15
1
Three Palettes
2
Why Places Have Colours
3
Collect Ten
4
Build the Class Palette
5
Somebody Else's Place
6
Make Something in Your Palette
7
What Have You Learned?