Color Mixing Birds with Kindergarten and First Grade

If you want to get some 18+ kindergarteners excited about Art, do color mixing. It is like magic to them and they will light up with such joy! (One of my favorite parts of the job!)

This project is a quick 1 day with finishing touches on day 2!

Day 1: Introduction. I love to start projects like this with a YouTube video. It engages them and they usually retain the information better than just speaking it, I started with this song from OkGo that they did for Sesame Street. Even my big kids love this one...

I have this video linked in powerpoint where we talk about what they just watched, primary colors making secondary and how they look all together....I can digitally make the colors mix in powerpoint with just transitions, I put the solid block over the two colors and transition it to fade in on the click and it makes it look like they mix!



After each mix is shown it says GO PAINT! This is because while we talk about what happens to each set of colors at the front of the room, my aid goes around to put the set of paint colors on their pages. (This system wouldn't work without her so I will have to figure out a better way in the future.) Red and Yellow take the longest because I demo. I just demo the brush strokes with black paint so they can see the magic of the colors mixing happen on their own. I put a big emphasis on size because they don't know that the final project is birds so I tell them to leave room for three blobs of mixing. After they finish orange, they come up to the front of the room to talk about the next set while they get new colors on their page. They do same routine one last time for purple.

When everyone is finished we watch one last video of claymation color mixing. I turn off the audio because it doesn't have anything to do with the claymation and I prompt them for what is going to happen next in the video...

Day 2: We review our color concepts with the OkGo video again and then we watch this amazing pixar short to reveal what our blobs will turn into.

Then they spend the rest of the time using sharpie, paper, and googley eyes to create their birds. The personalities on these guys are just hilarious!