Kindergarten Color Unit

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. 

We do a simple worksheet the first day to make color math problems. We do one row at a time and they get a sticker if they get the row right!

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

Once upon a time in a land far away there was a kingdom where people were happy and had all the things they needed.

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.

THE END

First Unit of the Year for Kindergarten

I am switching to Middle School next year and am passing my lessons down to the new primary school teacher for her to use (or not use) so I thought since I am writing them up I should put them on the blog. I'll be adding them one at a time or a unit at a time.

This is the 1st unit I do with with kindergarten, so it is pretty simple at first. The goal is to introduce them to the vocabulary they will need to draw: describing and drawing lines and shapes. We have a large ESL population so it is especially important to establish common words for the art room.

The first project is lines: straight, slanted, curved, wavy, loopy, zig-zag. This is a common project. We start out the day with reading Lines That Wiggle by Candace Whitman. We then draw in crayon lines across the page. This is a guided lesson and all the kids have to make each type of line, but not in the same spot. The next part is describing what a shape is: a line that closes on itself. We then paint inside the shapes with watercolor. Might as well get the paint out for the first project right?! 

The second lesson in the unit we learn about geometric shapes that have names. I show them Kandinsky's Circles and how there is one shape inside the other. We get out the tempera and paint shapes inside of shapes. I also allow them to add lines and dots in between.  It is such a simple project but they turn out really pretty. Just don't give them all the colors of paint! This is still the first month of school and for many the very first time they have gotten to use messy tempera paint! 

This is the final picture of the unit. The other two projects are very simple and a way to introduce vocabulary needed for this drawing. I explain that we are going to draw a pig (from If You Give A Pig a Pancake) using the lines and shapes we have learned. We use circles, triangles, curved lines, straight lines, and dots. Every time I do this so early in the year for a kindergartner, I am amazed at how well they do! They also enjoy making different foods for their piggy to eat! 

Starry Night

Every Art teacher does some sort of Starry Night right? I try to switch between painting and heavy drawing projects (for my own sanity) so the kinders were ready for painting after designing super awesome cars. Here's how I do Starry night with kinders.

I start out with a Mati and Dada video on Van Gogh. I don't have any time between classes, one goes out one comes in, so the video is a good way to let me set up for the kindergartners. Plus they really relate to the video that talking alone doesn't do. If you haven't seen these videos, they are 7 minutes long and are about a little girl who loves art and just happens to have a robot who can go back in time to take Mati to see her favorite artists.

After the video, I show "my favorite" Vincent Van Gogh painting - Starry Night. I ask only one simple question to the kids and have them talk about the answer with partners and then pick kids to share their answer. I ask them "What is the weather like in the painting and how can you tell?" Such a simple question and they always come up with a windy cold night and talk about the lines and colors.

Next we start painting. I split it into two days. We paint the blue backgrounds the one day with swirly strokes. Then we use marker caps to make about 5 circles evenly across the page. I show them how to make swirls starting at the stamped circles with white paint. I know this will be a hard concept for some kinders so I also give them the option to make concentric circles (something we have used before successfully). Hello differentiation. The kids on the top chose to make the harder swirls and the kids on the bottom made concentric circles.

The second day we added the black and yellow bits. I decided to make it a starry night in our own town of Woodland. For discussion we compared the town where Starry Night is to our own town in Washington. We start the 2nd part of the painting with a black  wavy line (a common vocabulary in my room) for the hills. We added houses on the hills if we wanted to. Then I show them a simple way to make pine trees using some brushstroke skills. Last we add neon yellow paint (that pops) using short lines or dots on top of the White swirls.

Hamster Hot Rod Race Cars

Sometimes it is the simplest projects the kids have the most fun with. The ones that give them a lot of choices.

We were inspired by the book Hamster Hot Rod by Cynthis Lord, illustrated by Derek Anderson. It is an adorable book, very sing songy. It is about a hamster who wants to enter a car race, but needs a race car. The book goes through decisions on how design his car. The kids really enjoy it and they start thinking about their decisions on their own car at every page.

(I need to warn you not to google the name of that book. Apparently there are rated x pics that use the same key words. If you want to see it go to amazon and look it up!)



I start out teaching them howto draw a car in a few different ways. All of the examples start with a basic rectangle and two circles. Then they need to decide on a shape for their front end, a shape for the back end, and accessories. I don't make them choose what I showed them, but it helps get their ideas flowing by seeing a few ways to do it. I do however make them all start with the basic rectagle and wheels as the basis and have templates for just those shapes for them to trace around that way they all end up roughly the same size and since we will be adding onto the rectangle to make the shape of the car the templates won't deter their creativity.

Below, some student examples of day one of the assignment. We will work on it one more day and add wheels that spin with brass fasteners, cut it out,  and some sort of bling (yet to be determined).

Black Light Art Show

Using blacklights to create a buzz in the art room and a presentation goal at the end

Like it or not visual arts sometimes needs a gimmick to get the community pumped about going to see an art show. School music shows and theater don't have that problem. People always want to see their kid in action, but with visual arts the action is already finished in the classroom.

I decided this year to have the kids create an art show centered around blacklights. The kids spent the entire month working on artwork, backdrops, and advertisements in the dark  to get themselves and their families excited about the show at the end of the month (which coincided with conferences). The results: a magical show that created quite a few "Whoas" and "Ahs!"


 

 The Supplies

What Glows Under UV

I decided to make the show into a theme of a garden so all of my activities stemmed from that idea with a few exceptions.

The first step was to figure out what materials glow under a blacklight. I started with testing things I apready had in my room and then went shopping to test for more. Some things glow more than others. The best materials I found were:

• Crayola Fluorescent Tempera (blue doesn't glow but can be mixed with red and yellow)
• Walmart Fluorescent Tempera (including blue)
• Highlighters (most yellows, some pink and orange)
• Neon Sharpies
• Crayola Extreme Colored Pencils
• Neon colored pipecleaners and puff balls
• Neon ribbon

The Blacklights

I didn't purchase glow in the dark paints. I used blacklights to make fluorescent things glow. The glow in the dark paints do however glow under a blacklight, but they are more pricey. There are two choices for blacklights whichI used a combination of.

1. Blacklight lightbulbs (from Home Depot or Walmart). These work really well together, but the downside is they get hot. They work well for spotlighting the show. They cost $5 each.

2. Strip Lights. These stay cool and give even light. Great for kids testing their artwork and drawing in front of. I paid $20 on ebay for mine.

Painting in the Dark

I really wanted the kids to experience painting with glowing materials in the dark. We tried a few ways of doing it.

1. When they were already working on their artwork I would turn out the lights and put on the blacklights for a couple minutes at a time. The kids really enjoyed this but of course lost focus on their paintings.

2. When the lights were on the kids could test their artwork to see how it glowed at 2 test stations on either side of the room. The paint glows so well that even with the lights on they could see it glow if it was near the light.

3. The day of the exhibition since I had the room cleared of furniture, I passed on art boards, paper and highlighters and we played some drawing games.

The Projects

Kindergarten Flowers

The green stem is actually yellow highlighter that glows light green. The blue around the flower is the white paper showing.

One 2nd grade class made more sophisticated flowers learning how to blend colors on the petals.

3rd Grade Lizards

2nd Grade Frogs with patterns on the belly

3rd Grade Negative Portraits.

We started with black paper and painted the faces and the backgrounds with fluorescent paint.

3rd Grade Positive Portraits. 

This class made portraits on white paper and put them on a black background. 

2nd Grade Snails

1st Grade Turtles

3rd Grade Owls on black paper with glow background.

1st Grade Shootong Stars

The Exhibition

Below are the 4 walls of the exhibition. I decided to not display the art in the traditional grid style but instead to create backdrops or landscapes that the art lived in. The decision was partly due to how many kids I had in the school (580)  as well as wanting to create a full experience for the kids that are K-3rd grade.

Paper Panel Walls

To create a gallery in my classroom I had to erect butcher block walls on two sides of the room attached to the ceiling grids. The paper walls hid my desk, cabinets and countertops. I took my tables out of the classroom for the week of the show.  I added duct tape to the top of the butcher paper that I could pierce my grid clips through and attach right to the gridwork. To make the bottom display straight I  folded over the bottom edge and stapled it to create a pocket for a yard stick to slide into.

 

 Here is the wall finished. You might notice that the paper is white in the sky area but on the photo with the blaclight it appears blue. Some white paper will glow blue under blacklights which worked perfectly for our sky.

Hands-On Activities

As part of the show I had stations with hands-on activities. On the counter on one side of my room I had science information about blacklights and several examples of things that glow with a black light that people at the show could touch and move.

From Nature:

• Rocks from nature (I purchased on ebay)
• Feathers
• Glowfish (real GMO fish from Petco that glow)

Manmade:

• Paints
• Highlighters
• Stickers, Pipecleaners etc
• Tonic Water

 I also put a flashlight out for people to see what colors the paint was when we painted in white light. I explained why this phenomenon happens in class with a Power Point presentation and printed out the slides and displayed them for the show.  Here is the link to the slideshow.

 

Counter with hands-on activities.

Edit: Now that the show is over I keep on finding more things that glow! Here's one I've tested. You can mix in highlighter marker into Model Magic! That opens more 3D options!