by Loreena Thiessen
Green is the colour of summer. Look around. You will see green everywhere. Look up into the trees, a canopy, or cover of leaves shades you from the hot sun. Look down at the green grass soft and cool under your feet. Look at the garden filled with growing green vegetables, and each growing flower that has lush green leaves accompanying it. Plants and flowers need green leaves in order to live.
Green is the colour of life. For trees, and plants, it is in the leaves that life giving food is manufactured. This feeds the plant. Green leaves are a factory, a food manufacturing process called photosynthesis. The green leaves absorb, or take in light from the sun, moisture from the earth, and carbon dioxide from the air to create carbohydrates, sugars, as the food they need to grow.
Green is the colour of many foods that give you, life, too. Spinach, Brussels Sprouts, broccoli, collard greens, and kale have vitamins, C and A, and minerals, calcium, potassium, and iron. These help you grow and keep you strong. Make sure you choose from the balance of all colours, orange as in carrots and yams, blue as in blueberries, and red tomatoes, and strawberries, as well as, green foods.
Green also means young or not yet fully ripe. A green banana, for example, is not as ripe as a yellow one. Tomatoes and peppers start out green and turn orange and red as they ripen. You can say, “that banana is too green; I’ll have it when it has ripened.”
Green is also used to describe a healthy and clean environment. When you recycle things to be used again, or made into something else that is useful, you are keeping the environment clean, or green. A green environment is one where we use less, re-use more, and keep our environment clean, for example, by not littering.
This includes where people work, and play, the air we breathe, the water we drink. The same is true for animals. Like people do, animals breathe the air, and drink water. For water animals, rivers, lakes, and the sea, is their home. They, too, need a clean environment to live in. And only people can work to keep it clean.
In the Bible, too, green means life. In Genesis 1:30 God says every green herb is meant to be food for both people and animals, food for life. In Psalm 23:2 the shepherd leads his sheep to streams of water in green pastures; water and food for the sheep. In Jeremiah 17:8 God says if you trust him you are like a tree growing near water, having green leaves and bearing fruit, a healthy living tree. Trusting God gives you, life.
Activity: Make a chart to show how many colours you ate.
Need: pencil, notepaper, ruler, pencil crayons.
Do: Make the chart with a column for one colour of food—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple. Within each column have spaces for each portion of the food you eat. Then colour in one space for each food you eat. Which colour of food did you eat more of?