This is part of my 15 minute focus for 4’s series. Children learn about the idea of color mixing, and are also introduced to dry watercolor paints as a tool.

Objective: children will be able to say what secondary colors you create by mixing primary colors.

Supplies

• watercolor palettes, including brushes
• water
• paper – 2 pieces per person
• Translucent colorful items in the primary colors (could be color paddles, or scarves, cellophane, or almost anything). Totally optional: overhead projector

Demo

Use some translucent objects and a light source to show them how when you mix blue and yellow you get green, blue and red make purple, and yellow and red make orange.

I use these color paddles on an old overhead projector, but you could also use a light table, or hold them up to a window, or shine a flashlight through them to make a colored shadow on the wall. You could do something similar with colored scarves, colored cellophane or whatever you have.

Activity

Then I handed out the watercolor palettes, with brushes, and paper.

Up until now, we have only used wet paints in class, so it was a chance to introduce how to work with a dry paint palette.

I told them to use their paintbrushes to get some red paint. Hmm… dry paintbrushes don’t work! I showed them how to wet their paintbrush, wet the paint, stir it up a bit to get some paint on the brush, and then add paint to the paper. Then handed out the water.

We explored that for a while with just blue, then we learned about rinsing brushes and using other colors.

Then I showed them how to make a rainbow by painting a fat red stripe, then painting with yellow so part of the stripe mixes with the red paint to make orange, then adding blue so part of it mixes with the yellow to make green. Then I gave them a fresh piece of paper for their rainbows. Here’s my example and their results:

Optional Supplements:

Book: Mouse Paint by Walsh (preview video)

Song: here’s a whole playlist of rainbow songs for kids.

There are lots more color mixing and rainbow ideas in my Rainbow Science post.