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!

Language Arts Block

Group time has been very challenging this year. We have two blocks of language arts differentiated by ability. The "lower" group is much more quiet during this time, seem to get along better with each other and handle "centers" after they are finished with their independent work well.

The "higher" group is noisier, interrupt me during guided reading often, argue with each other during "centers" . . . I can barely get through my guided reading groups.

Time for a new plan!

I researched and found that many teachers use a Daily 5 format . . . I was not familiar with the term but am very familiar with the format of it. I decided this was what my "higher" group needed, challenging, structured, quiet activities. Tried it out this week and it was much better!

Here's what the choices were (I have a Daily 6):

Read to Self: Library books or books from the chair pockets (that are leveled).
Read to a Friend: Same books as above. Friends take turns reading each page in their books.
Pocket Chart with Pointers: Build sentences and reading with pointers.
Word Work: Sight word coloring sheet & play-doh sight words.
Write the Room: Recording sheet on clip boards. Students search the room for "school words" that are posted to write down.    
Working on Writing: Making lists. Students use fun notepads to write on in the writing center.

I found some great resources! Here are the links:

Daily 5 Classroom Management System has pre-made and editable signs to post in the classroom. (free)

Write the Room Back to School is good for introducing Write the Room for the 1st time. ($1)

Sentence Building Set is great for the pocket chart. It comes with sight words as well as pictures by season. ($3.75)

Sight Word Coloring Sheet is what we used for Word Work to review the sight words we have learned in class. (free from us) 

Number Art

This week for our integrated art lesson our inspiration was Robert Indiana. 

He is probably most well known for his LOVE sculpture and painting.

Our art focus was positive and negative space. The letters in red are the positive spaces and the blue and green background are negative.

We also showed the kids Robert Indiana's NUMBER sculptures and paintings focusing on the use of positive and negative space.

Who knew letters and numbers could become art?

The kids were told to do the following:

1. Write their names on the back of the 7" x 7" cardboard.

2. Choose 4 different colors of construction paper for the negative space.

3. Write 4 different numbers in the spaces as large as they can with a pencil.

4. Glue different materials to create the numbers: seeds, pom poms, beads, yarn, straws . . . anything we have available at the time. 

(we use tacky glue to make sure everything stays on).

Here are the results!

Stay tuned for our art lesson next week!

Kindergarten Schedule for 3rd Week of School and Groups!

By the 3rd week of school we have completed a basic assessment of the kids (alphabet, letter-sounds, sight words, counting and number recognition) to place them into groups.
The 3rd week is all about getting the kids to remember their team colors and rotating from table to table during groups.

To help the kids remember their team colors we bought colored hair bands for them to wear on their wrists.

Here are the plans for week 3 of school!
You will notice that some of my plans are typed out, and the rest I will hand-write in.
Also, you will only see what's happening in my room during the language arts block. While I am teaching the language arts small group block Suzanne is teaching whole group math in her room. We do this for an hour and then switch and do it all over again! The two groups are differentiated. We do this Monday, Wednesday & Friday. On Thursday instead of guided reading, I teach writing instead.

Later in the day you will see "FLIP FLOP".
This is another differentiated block. I teach science and social studies. While in the other room Suzanne teaches shared reading and reading comprehension. We have each group for 1/2 hour and then switch.

I know complicated right? It took a lot of work to figure out, and there is no down time at all but it's great to be able to differentiate our lessons to meet the needs of our students.

Friday we had no school.

Coming soon a post on how I manage my language small group block!