Red Light - A Nursery Rhyme... And Amber - A colour

If you are a parent you must be familiar with 'Red Light Red Light What Do You Say'.

Here's another one that Anant (that's my seven year old son) learnt when he was in Senior KG.  It goes like this:

 Red, amber and green

The traffic lights are seen.

Red light on the top

Says, "you may stop."

Green light below

Says, "you may go."

Amber light in-between

Says, "Wait! For red or green."

 With this rhyme came a new word, which was a new colour name - Amber!Which, in turn led us to learn some thing more. About amber itself! 

 

We learnt that some trees have a kind of coloured juice in their trunks. And years and years ago, i.e. millions of years ago, it so happened that this gooey juice would come out of the trees and would lie there as drops or puddles and dry up and become hard and would dry up more and would get buried under the earth and would turn into stone! 

 Things like this that turn into stone after being buried for years and years, well, millions and millions of years actually, are called fossils.

So Amber is also a kind of fossil, which is so shiny and beautiful that people dig it out and make jewellery of it! 

And you know what! Sometimes a small insect would get trapped in such amber and even after million and millions of years, it remained intact, just as it was! Poor thing!

(All images taken from Wikipedia)