December: Color Theory PK-2nd

For the month of December, I focused on two main concepts throughout the grades. The first was color theory which is  primary color mixing for PK-K. They go slow and steady throughout this month, focusing on only one secondary color per day (purple,green,orange). The books that I read all have to do with color mixing such as Little Blue and Little Yellow, Mouse Paint, The Color Tree and Is it red?Is it yellow?Is it Blue? The idea is just to expose them to the concepts and make sure they adhere to painting rules of clean brush and not mixing everything! They learn to separate the piles of primary between mixable and leave it alone! This will give them more colors to choose from during paint time. We focused on putting shapes together to make a city scape, much like a puzzle now. They were given a demonstration, then examples are left on the table during work time. The first day not too great, but by the third and final period they were really starting to get it!
The 1st and 2nd Grade worked with the color wheel and mixing all 3 primary colors at the same time. They were asked to create the pizza with templates and rulers, then fill in the correct colors on the color wheel. I have 5th graders now that still remember doing this 4 years ago. The color wheel is referenced often for lessons on complementary colors, warm and cool colors and mixing primary colors. It is useful for them to learn this early! They also began cityscapes, focused more on overlapping the buildings to produce depth. They had to use all 6 colors on the plate while of course washing the brush.Enjoy!