Art Part I - Primary/Secondary Colors

We started our Art Unit by talking about Primary and Secondary Colors, and color mixing.   We read the stories A Color of His Own by Leo Lionni and Mouse Paint and discussed how red and blue make purple, red and yellow make orange, blue and yellow make green.  Then we did a dabber paint rainbow (from Making Learning Fun) using only the Red, Blue and Yellow dabbers.  The only bad thing about the page was there wasn't a arch for purple. 

Then we made pictures using only Red, Blue and Yellow paints.  Georgie painted..."a dancing alien.  That's why his foot is up, he's doing a dance with one foot up then the other.  Like a penguin.  He's a penguin alien."

We used color paddles I had from Oriental Trading to make different colors (red paddle and blue paddle make purple, etc.) and also to view different parts of the room and see how it looks.

We watched Magic School Bus Makes a Rainbow which discusses how white light shines through a prism and is separated into all the colors.  It also shows how light will bend when it hits a mirror or reflective object and how objects are different colors because only that color is reflected for us to see.

We played with a prism trying to make rainbows on different parts of the walls and table.  It wasn't easy to shine it in a specific place since we were using the sunlight from a skylight but we were able to shine it so we could observe the rainbow.  We discussed how many colors we could see and what order they were in.  We discussed whether the order of the colors changed when we moved the prism around.   Georgie kept sticking his hands (and face) in the rainbow.

We finished up by doing a science experiment from Science Experiments for Young Learners about categorizing objects based on how much light shines through.  We looked at: a clear plastic cup, a light colored plastic cup, a dark plastic cup, aluminum foil, plastic wrap, waxed paper and tissue paper.  We held each item up to the light and decided whether it let through a lot of light (transparent), a little bit of light (translucent) or no light (opaque).  We then looked around the room to find other things for each category.  Transparent (windows, fish tank) and opaque (just about everything) were easy.  Translucent was harder.

I'm trying to make sure we do Math and Reading everyday.  I reviewed greater than and less than with Georgie by playing a slightly modified version of War.  We each had approximately half the deck of cards.  We'd each put one down and then he would choose which symbol would go between them =, < or >.  He did really well with this so we moved on to finishing up our MEP Lesson 7.  Instead of having him write on the worksheet I let him use stickers on a large piece of paper to do the assignment.  He had to put the correct number of stickers in circles to make the symbols true.  He did really well with this also. 

For Reading, I took some of the sentences from our current Progressive Phonics book and made a poster to hang on the wall.  We will be able to review these frequently throughout the day.  We also played our Short A sounds UNO that I downloaded from Kellys Kindergarten.

Our final activity for the day was Physical Education.  After 4 straight days of rain, we had a gorgeous sunny day so Daddy took the kids to the park.   I found the first crocuses popping through the mud.

To see more fun Preschool Ideas visit Preschool Corner at Homeschool Creations.