Kindergarten Color Studies

Because color and groups of color are so important in art, we start kindergarten art with the color families. Older kids revisit these families often!

Rainbow Colors: We started this year with "Rainbow Turtles." This project helped us learn rainbow order which gives us the context for all of the following color families! (The warm colors are the first part of the rainbow the cool colors are the last one.  Once students know their primary colors they can figure out how to make the secondary colors because the secondaries are sandwiched in between the primaries!)

Warm Colors: The "Warm Sun" projects helps kids to visualize which colors are the warm colors. We also talk about that if we were able to "magically" go into the painting the temperature (created by the colors) looks like it would feel warm in the picture.

Cool Colors: The "Cool Landscape" project gives us the opportunity to link cool colors with the cool temperature of mountains, grass and water.

Neutral Colors: "Neutral Night Owls" focuses on the colors that are missing from the rainbow: Brown, grey, white and black!

Primary Colors: The "Primary Popsicles" project is the project were we start talking about what colors

Secondary Colors: "Mouse Paint" is a great story for color mixing! I use this story to focus on the the secondary colors!

Owl Texture

Kindergarteners made these cute texture owls!  We talked about texture (the way something feels or looks like it would feel) and the neutral color family (black, white, brown and grey).

Owl Babies a great story book that I like to use to point out texture in the art!

Learning Goals: I can...

- Tear paper to create texture (fine motor, hand strengthening activity)

- Tell about the neutral color family

- Tell about texture

Neutral Night

Kindergarteners have been learning about color families.   For this project we looked at the neutral color family and created our neutral nights using only the neutral colors, black, brown, white and grey.   At night it is difficult to see warm and cool colors because light is needed to see color.  A night scene is great for showing neutral colors!  We also noticed that these colors were not on our (simplified) color wheel.

Learning Goal: I can pick out the neutral colors.    Not only did we talk about color, we also talked about shapes.  We used cut paper to create our neutral nights. We first cut the corners off our white squares to create an octagon.  Then we trimmed more corners off until it became a large circular moon. This is the best way to get a large circle without tracing! To create our tree trunks we cut triangles!  Great job kindergarteners.