Clear Spring School is full of wiggly life forms! I had the pleasure of working with some of them this week when the first through sixth graders at Clear Spring School came together in Miss Jenny’s room for a hands-on lesson on color mixing. My friend, Helen, who made the awesome slide show on color theory had to cancel her part of the lesson for this week so I had a quick brainstorming session and came up the idea to have the kids make finger print color wheels as we mixed secondary and tertiary colors and then to use those colors to create a gigantic version of Twister that teams of students could play.
I did a super quick intro to show them that there are many ways of organizing colors. They viewed a mixing chart from a paint manufacturer, a photo of the Munsell color tree and finally a wheel. I asked them about the primary colors and gave each student a card with one of the primary colors to divide them into three work teams. Everyone received a piece of illustration board and headed to their color work table. I wished I had made a sample card for each table or better yet a drawn a template on each student’s board to guide them in the creation of their color wheel because it was kind of difficult to know where to make the fingerprints. It turned out fine as it was because they all got prints of all the colors and the questions about the color organization provided the opportunity to review the basic idea that color can be organized in many ways. Besides that, the individuality was striking and is always encouraged at Clear Spring School.
I was glad to see that all three teachers chose to stay in the room with us, knowing I was cracked when I said it would be a piece of cake for me to take them all! Miss Jenny kept the room clean and calm, Michelle led the way through the moments of transition and Mark guided his older group of students through a discussion of complementary and analogous colors, color temperature and associations. It was fun to hear him asking the questions which led his students to a realization that there are shared cultural beliefs about colors. Meanwhile, amidst the chaos and excitement, the students finished adding all the colors to a giant color wheel which I had outfitted with a spinning pointer. (It’s super pretty and I’ll try to get a photo of it next time I visit the school.) Then we drew circles in a grid on an old sheet. While I painted their hands with a color, I asked the students questions about that color’s name and how it was mixed. They did quite well with the secondary colors and had a lot of fun making handprints on the sheet. It turned out beautiful. It should be a fun game for them to play. Next week, we will do some more color theory with Helen and her slideshow, and that will review the color mixing, talk about color schemes and the expression of emotion through color.
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