Colours - a quick, fun unit!

We discuss primary and secondary colours, colour mixing, and touch on tints and shades and warm and cool colours.

As I mentioned before, How to Teach Art to Children is a great resource for this unit.

I start by discussing the primary colours - red, yellow, and blue - and try to drill that in, plus the fact that they are the main, hence, primary colours.

Then I demonstrate colour mixing using food colouring and water with a document camera.  

I love how during my demonstrations they find it magical when two primary colours are mixed to create a secondary!  While I'm mixing, they colour in their colour wheels.

Over the years I've tried different activities which allowed the kids to mix colours themselves - tempera paint, shaving cream and food colouring, and play dough.  I must say, play dough is the quickest and easiest - little prep and no clean-up!

Since it's early in the year, I demonstrated adding black/white to a colour using tempera paint.  A few years back I had the kids do it, but it didn't turn out too well.  They had a hard time keeping the brushes clean.  Suggestions are more than welcome!

For a centre activity, I put out a colouring mixing math activity where they had to solve the missing "sums" and "addends".  They used colour paddles and colour wheel/colour mixing anchor charts to help when they got stuck.

I created a Color Mixing Fun pack which includes posters for primary, secondary, warm, and cool colors, and tints and shades, color wheels, and 16 color mixing activity mats.  You can check it out at my TPT store and BP Shop.