Friday, January 4, 2013

Primary Colors | Elementary Art Lesson

I've had a super productive evening of photo editing and yearbook, so I'm going to do a post about a lesson I started today with kindergarten and first grade.  I don't always double up on my lessons, and I actually prefer not to, that way I can re-use lessons next year if I'm in a pinch.  The kids had a great time today, which always makes my heart feel good :).  Kids were singing, dancing, and getting excited about learning!  As the title of the post suggests, the lesson was teaching the primary colors and color mixing.  I started by checking some prior knowledge and asking questions like "who knows how to make the color orange?"  After I got a feel of what the students knew, I talked a little bit about color mixing and the fact that you can't make red, yellow, or blue because they are the primary colors.  Then I showed these 2 videos.  [I'm lucky enough to have access to a projector right now! AND to my Johnston County people, youtube works now!]

This one first: 


And then this one:


I showed them in this order because the music video got them riled up, and then Mouse Paint got them settled back down.  I got the students back to their seats where their supplies were waiting and I heard things like "Look! It's the primary colors!" [and then my heart smiled]

For this project I decided to make a color wheel out of mice, and I used templates for them to trace mostly to save time.

We traced 6 of these "drops" on our paper and then we turned them into mice:


Here's the mouse I used for the above images :) [my example mouse had 4 legs by the way haha]

We started with red first and I used q-tips to help control the amount of paint they were using BUT I do reuse the q-tips.  I got the students to paint the red mouse and the yellow mouse, and then they put a few red dots on the mouse in between.  [q-tips come in handy here] After that, the students used their yellow q-tip to add yellow to red and VOILA! Orange!  The kids were amazed. I got as far as I could, but this will be a 2 day lesson for sure.  [Plus I just HAD to show the music video again :)]  I'll show you some finished products once I get some!  I also meant to take a photo of my example and the board, but oh well!

First grade:

Kindergarten:

How cute are these?? Have a great weekend!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

As a hopeful teacher one day, I love this idea! It is very cute! Good Job! :)

Anonymous said...

This is so cute! I was looking for a lesson on primary colors as well as a draw-a-critter project. Perfect! And I love the q-tip idea. One of the boys I work with is a little too hands-on with the paint.