art curriculum: exploring color

Our art classes this year have centered around a few simple units that are taught over a period of about 3 weeks to a month each. We explored the properties of clay during our first unit of the year, experimented with collage during our second unit, and have settled into a study of paint and color during our third unit.

We began the unit by learning about the three primary colors and how they can be mixed to create secondary colors. Having just completed a unit on maps, we had the children create their own "color maps" (a la Sara Fanelli's "My Map Book") to show the three primary colors and the three secondary colors. Each child mixed their colors independently to create their own, unique map. Once they finished their painting, they worked with a teacher to draw arrows around their map to indicate which primary colors were mixed to create each secondary color.

The next step of our exploration led us to look for primary and secondary colors in the world around us. We first brainstormed as a group to come up with things that were naturally each color; for example, yellow sunflowers, orange peppers, purple irises, blue blueberries, green artichokes, and red roses. Next, we gathered loads of magazine pages (pre-selected by the teachers) for the kids to search through and cut out pictures of red, yellow, blue, purple, orange, and green objects. The children cut (excellent fine-motor skill work!) and then sorted the pictures (excellent visual discrimination and categorization work!) according to their color. Finally, we created a "color collage" - a circle divided into six pieces - to display our findings. Looking at our final product, the children quickly realized that though we had many pictures of each color, no color was exactly the same. We noted how many shades of green, purple, orange, blue, red, and yellow we found and guessed that there were probably many more shades that we did not find. This led us into a discussion of tertiary colors as well as, of course, a discussion of what it means to have "shades" of a color.

The last phase of this unit will be to create our own color wheel. I can't wait! It will be interesting to see what the children take away from this unit and how their understanding of color and painting will change in the coming months.