Mixing Colors to Make Secondary Colors

This week we taught the kids how to mix primary colors to make secondary colors. We started off with a review of the primary colors using our Smart Board Notebook presentation from last week. 

To to TPT to download this Notebook Lesson for free!

Then read the book White Rabbit's Color Book by Alan Baker. This is a great introduction to mixing colors. The kids really loved listening to this story and were trying to predict what color the rabbit would make next.

The next slide reviewed what happened in the story: how two primary colors mixed together make other colors called secondary colors. 

This video was another fun way to demonstrate mixing colors:

Finally, the kids got to mix some colors of their own!

Materials:
Small paper plate palettes
Tempera paints (red, yellow, and blue)
Q-tips
(We wanted to focus on mixing colors without the additional mess when using brushes and water)
Paper towels
Color mixing sheets from Lilliput Station (freebie)
*We added the letters to help the kids start with the correct primary colors.

Steps:

1. Students use q-tips to fill in each square with the correct primary color. 

2. For the last box in each row, fill in the box with the first primary color and then layer on top with the second color, mixing the two in the box.

Tips:

1. Have plenty of q-tips.

2. Make sure kids refer to the letters so they know what color to paint in each box.

3. A little blue goes a looooong way when mixing to make green and purple.

This was a great lesson! 

Stayed tuned to see how we use what we learned to create our own works of art next week!