Color Unit for Kinders
We focus on learning primary and secondary colors in kindergarten and leave the color wheel until 1st grade. I absolutely LOVE this video for mixing colors by Scratch Garden The song is catchy and the kids love the weird imagery. They also talk about warm and cool colors which I don't think kinder is ready for yet.
Next we do 2 projects with color mixing and I play that Scratch Garden video at the beginning of every class of the unit to get it stuck in their head!
The first assignment is a simple crown inspired by a story my family and I wrote about a king who loved purple (below) We paint cyan and magenta paint in stripes, daubs etc. on a 6x8 piece of paper and let it dry. The next week we fold the paper in half and make a zig-zag line (vocab from line/shape unit) across and cut while folded to get a crown. Then add some holes and glitter for jewels.
I have also done this project as a full portrait which was cute. It just depends on how much time you have.
For the other secondary colors we make a simple shield. We cut it out of 12 x 18 paper folded in half again and paint the entire thing yellow. While it is still wet, we mix in orange in 2 quadrants and blue in the other two quadrants, leaving shapes if we want. This would be great on a thicker card stock if you have it, with a handle on the back.
Here's the story my children , husband and I wrote for the color unit!!
The King Who Loved Purple
The King in this land had a favorite color: purple. He thought it was the perfect color. Why would you have any other color except purple?
He loved it so much that one day he decided that he didn’t want anything in his kingdom that wasn’t purple. His servant hung signs all around the kingdom and knocked on doors telling people to throw away anything that wasn’t purple.
When the day came people threw away so many things.
They threw away red cups, blue bowls, beige computers, and pink polka-dotted sweaters.
They threw away black computers, yellow iPods, and plaid lampshades.
They even threw away the King’s lemon-meringue-striped rainbow-checkered pajamas. Everything would not be perfect until all non-purple colors were removed!
As he was walking through his kingdom looking at everything people were throwing away he saw an old painter throwing away his paints. The painter was sad, but squirted his red paint and his blue paint in the garbage can.
But when the two paints mixed together in the can, something amazing happened. They turned into purple!
“Wait,” said the King to the painter. “How is that possible? Why did that happen?”
The painter looked at him, puzzled. “Don’t you know that purple is just red and blue mixed together?”
The King hadn’t known this, and thought about it a minute. “So, if I like purple, I really like red and blue in a way?”
“Of course.” said the painter. “You can’t have purple without red and blue. Besides, if everything is one color, then purple won’t be as special anymore.”
The king thought long and hard about this. He sort of missed his red cups, and his blue bowls. And he even missed the other colors too -- the pink iPods and the plaid lampshades. And he especially missed his lemon-meringue-striped rainbow-checkered pajamas.
The King looked at the painter. “So if we have red and blue, we can make purple any time we want?”
“Absolutely,” said the painter.
“Well,” the king said, “I suppose given that other colors make purple, it might be okay to a have a FEW things that aren’t purple…”
And so the people took back their red cups, and blue bowls. They reattached their plaid lampshades, and put back on pink-polka-dotted sweaters. And everything was the same again, except for maybe the king, who sat with the painter in his living room, mixing red and blue paints together happily and painting big purple sunsets.
While, of course, wearing his lemon-meringue-striped rainbow-checkered pajamas.
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