3rd Grade is COLOR CRAZY!

A Huge emphasis is on color theory click here to see COLOR EXPERIMENTS day 1 .  These color experiments led us to some great INVESTIGATION.  We borrowed some magnifying glasses to look closely at our color mixes.

Investigating led to DISCOVERY...

Discovery led to DESCRIPTIVE & CREATIVE LABELING...

3rd Grade Color Experiments

Third grade is a big year for color theory.  Every year it is a new adventure and this year I think we figured out a perfect way to experiment with color interactions or color mixing.  After really looks at and understanding what the color is and how it works - it was time to explore.  We used regular crayola markers on plain white paper.  We colored and filled our paper with all of our marks.  We thought about what colors we wanted to put next to each other and started to predict what would happen it they mixed.

Then, the magic begins... plain ol' clear and clean water and a paint brush is all you need for this trick.  When the marker is wet it turns into what looks like watercolor paint!  It moves and mixes, runs, and drips.  SO NEAT and needless to say AMAZING!

When our experiments were over we discussed what happened.  Did anything happen that we predicted, or did something happen that was unexpected.  Artists became scientists for a day in the art room.

Tints and Shade of Snowmen

3rd Grade is learning about TINTS and SHADES.  We have learned a lot about how to mix colors, and now we are practicing making tints and shades.
Tint has a kind of a rhyme... all you need to remember is to make a Tint, add White, and it makes it light.  Tint-White-Light.
Shade is a different story, no rhymes, but some letters in common.  To made a Shade, add Black, and it makes it Dark.

A work in progress, Day One- TINTs

The art room was a buzz on day one.  Wow, look at this color!!! I made a tint!  Does this tint look darker?  Day One we mixed 3 tints-a light, medium, and dark.

Day Two - Shades took over.  We mixed a shade of our original color to paint the snowman's accessories.  Once again, a buzz of excitement.  Everyone was very careful to only use a little black at a time.

I was so happy with how these paintings turned out that I hung them up immediately in the display case.  Fortunately, 1st grade also finished their pinch pot snowmen today, and the 3rd grade painting make a beautiful backdrop.

Monsters!

Roll-a-Monster!  What a fun project for this time of the year.  Each student had a dice and a worksheet.  Each roll lead them to build and draw a different part of the monster.  With the primary kids it helped reinforce looking and the dice and matching numbers to the right column of the sheet.  For intermediate kids we also worked on ENLARGING and shrinking our monsters with correct proportions... tricky concept.

Then we let our imaginations run wild with naming our monsters and writing something interesting about them.

Thanks to http://www.expressivemonkey.com/ for all of their amazing resources!

Color Mixing Light Bulbs

Every year I look for a new way to teach color theory.  This year I looked around for inspiration... then a light bulb sparked an idea-haaha.  Colored Light Bulbs! Perfect, they are transparent so having two different colored overlapping light bulbs would make a third color.  We discussed the different parts of a light bulb and the different shapes.

Color Mixing- Overlapping Light Bulbs

After we drew the light bulb shapes we filled them in with the PRIMARY colors -red, yellow, blue.  Where a light bulb overlapped another we had to think... red+yellow = orange, yellow+blue = green, blue+red = purple.

Last but not least we shaded the metal with our pencil and added black broken glass shapes in the background to break up the space and make our colors pop!