A Magical Forest

I love the outdoors, so bringing landscapes into my classroom is always a great joy for me. The first thing my little artists created were the painted paper trees. We divided the paper into sections and drew patterns with crayons. Students then painted over these patterns with different shades of green. Day two consisted of setting up the landscape. We created the ground with construction paper, an orange sun and some clouds. We talked about the secondary colors (orange, violet and green) because they made up most of our beautiful landscapes. In the end, we added some texture with sponges and cut out different sized trees with added white paint branches. This is an easy and fun project that is abstract just enough so all students felt confident and created a masterpiece!

Primary Popsicles

One of my favorite things to teach PreKinder and Kindergarten students is color mixing. Younger students are AMAZED by mixing primary colors and creating new secondary colors. This lesson incorporated color mixing along with learning the primary and secondary colors.

On the first day, I read the story Mouse Paint by Ellen Walsh so students could see how mixing primary colors can create all three secondary colors. We then divided a paper into three sections and mixed two primary colors in each to create green, orange and violet. During the next class, we also divided a paper into three sections and then created different line patterns with secondary colors in the background. The final class is when students cut out the popsicles and glued them onto the patterns with a popsicle stick. Students really loved this project because they love mixing and creating new colors!