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Why we made this colouring sheet set

We're the team behind the Colour-In Playhouses: cardboard playhouses that children colour in themselves before climbing inside for hours of imaginative play. When we were designing new scenes for that range, we kept noticing that most colouring pages, craft activities, and toys in general available to South African families feature imagery that could belong anywhere. For example, snowmen and ski scenes, or those barn scenes that look nothing like the farms our kids actually visit, or cute-but-not-local cottages plucked from somewhere in Europe.

There's nothing wrong with that kind of imagery on its own, but we felt there was a space for something different: colouring pages that actually look like home. So we made three, featuring a windmill standing in Karoo scrubland, a traditional Cape Dutch home tucked among proteas and fynbos (with a unicorn! we've always thought this look deserved a bit of whimsy!), and a little village of our own, lined by Yellowwood trees.

As it turns out, there is some real thinking behind this idea. For example, researcher Rudine Sims Bishop wrote that books (and by extension, the media and material children grow up with) work as mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors. Sometimes a story is a window into a world a child doesn't know yet, and that's valuable. But children also need mirrors, which are images and stories that reflect their own world back at them, so they can recognise it, feel at home in it, and see it as worth paying attention to.

Early childhood educators talk about something similar when it comes to how young children build understanding of the world around them. Preschoolers make sense of new experiences by connecting them to things they already recognise. A child who has seen a windmill on a family trip, or who knows what a protea smells like after rain, gets something different out of colouring that scene than colouring a generic image set on another continent. The activity becomes a small act of recognition, not just an exercise in staying inside the lines.

That's the thinking behind our first little set of colouring sheets, and it's the same thinking behind our Colour-In Playhouses, especially our farmhouse. We want the things our kids build, colour, and play with to feel like they belong to their world. Have a look at our playhouses, and we think you'll see that these little colouring pages belong to the same world.