Collaborative Color Wheel

The collaborative color wheel was my follow up lesson to the color recipe books, and to a bigger discussion about rainbows and color wheels we had during Art Talk.   

Art Talk is a 30 minute period I have with each class once a month where I have time to connect art and literacy in their classroom.  Last month this was a perfect time to read a book called Colors, and have a discussion about rainbows and color wheels.  The children really enjoyed the book and the conversation.

During this time while we were making our recipe books, I asked each child to document their colors on a long strip of paper in the middle of the table.  When a student finished their book I asked them to cut some of the circles out. (This is also great practice with fine motor skills and cutting in general.) 

 

Then when that job was done... finished students began sorting the colors into trays.  

Then each class got two pieces of the color wheel to work with...opposite colors so they had space to work, which of course make them complimentary! They added and overlapped all of the colors they made. 

This amazing color wheel is the collaboration of all 60 second graders and the colors they made for their recipe books.

Color Recipe Books

In Second Grade the students are currently working on poetry in literacy and writing clear equations when working on math problems.  As way to connect them... in the Art Studio we are making Color Recipe Books! 
It is insanely fun!

We began by exploring paint for two classes.  For those two classes the students worked on one large painting with the goal to fill the entire space, and mix at least five invented colors.  The paintings were quite beautiful.

Next, we talked about all the beautiful colors they mixed, and how it can be difficult to remember how you made a certain color.  We decided to make a recipe book with all the colors we love, so we will always know how to make them, and can share the recipes with our friends.

They needed to create three parts to each recipe.
1. A shape where the color would be painted.
2. A clear recipe equation with words that helped us remember how much of each color we used.  For example, a big spoonful of yellow+ a little dab of red + a medium dab of white=
3. A juicy descriptive name for their color. (When writing poetry, they look for juicy words to make a poem more interesting.  And that is what we did with our colors!)  There can be many kinds of orange, but the orange I made is Juicy Peach.

It took four classes to finish their book, including the title page.

I could not have been happier with the results!  The kids had a amazing time!  They did not want this project to end.  "I want to mix colors all day!" Yes, I heard this many times. And I can totally relate ;)