Mixing colors!

Our science focus this week was on colors. We talked about the 3 primary colors and what colors they create when mixed together. We read the usual "Mouse Paint" and did a simple mouse paint activity using only markers. The children mixed colors using food coloring. I found small plastic ice trays on the Dollar Tree that I filled with water. Each child had their own tray and eye dropper. In the center of the table were 3 baby food jars filled with the primary colors. The children used their eye dropper to drop colors from the baby food jars into their ice cube tray to create a different color. I would not recommend using the colored plastic trays that I used, though. It was a little difficult for my kiddos to see their color creation. Unfortunately I live in a college town and this was the weekend that the college kids moved in and I was told they bought all the regular ice cube trays, so I was stuck with the colored ones! Oh well!

 

We especially had fun with the color section of Deanna Jump's Back to School with Math and Literacy pack.  I gave each child 2 colors of play dough that they mixed together and created new colors. That was fun!

Then we read "Monster Mess" by Deanna and did the "Five Little Monsters" poem. My students were having such a fun time with the cute monsters that I decided to extend the monster activity. So I created a booklet called "My Monster Color Faces" and here is how the kids did their pages.
We discussed what colors are used to create Orange which of course, is red and yellow. I had red and yellow paper strips available for them to glue onto their page for their monster's hair. They could ONLY use red and yellow because those are the colors used to create orange. When their hair was finished, they raised their hand and I put 2 spots of red and yellow paint on their monster face. They used 2 fingers to mix the colors and voila!, they created an orange monster face! Then they used a glue bottle to put dots of glue on their monster face where the eyes, nose, and mouth should be. I let them add more than 2 eyes to their monster if they wished! They used a pom-pom for a nose and a piece of rick rack for a mouth.

We followed this same procedure for the green and purple monster face. Of course, since this is the beginning of the year, we only did one monster face a day! I added a Rainbow Monster face to the end of the packet, but we ran out of time to do this page. We will do the Rainbow Monster face next week. For the Rainbow Monster, they will use water colors to paint their monster's face and use red, blue, yellow, green, orange, and purple paper strips for the hair. This was really a fun project and the kids had a ball with it! If you would like the pages, you can click here for My Monster Color Book.  As I was reflecting on my day last night, I had an AHA moment...... Instead of all the pages being a circle shape, why not make the faces different shapes and a shape study could also be included??? So........ here is the link to a doc with different shaped faces if you would like circle, square, hexagon, and triangle shaped faces!  Different shapes Monster Color Book 

My little kinders were having so much fun picking out their monster's nose that I just had to take their picture looking for just the right pom pom!

Until next time! Blessings!