A Little Green

 
Our Color Mixing Project continues to excite us at Art and Soul Preschool.
As it is that time of year when green becomes more than a color; it becomes an emotion, 
a season, a holiday, and a memory to hold onto, it was only fitting that we chose it as our color this week to focus in on.

During Color Mixing Lab, the children were given blue and yellow colored water and were 

invited to make as many different colors of green that they felt they could.

The magic of watching two colors mix into a new color never gets old, it continues to excite and reinforce previous learning on color mixing, as well as elicit such responses as:

"I made green out of blue."-M.N.
"Look I made blue-green!"-E.P.H.
"This is teal blue, and look Mommy, I made Tore quse!"-E.P.B.
"Do you mean turquoise?" -D.P.
"Yes, and I also made bluish, blueberry, bluish, bluish!" -E.P.B.
"This is dark, silly kitty, dark golf ball, green grass with gumdrops in the middle." -J.P.
"Wow, that is a long name." D.P.
"It's just the color green it is."-J.P.
"Wow, Greeeeeen!!!."-O.R.
"I like green."-S.G.
"Yeah, green, green, green."-M.N.

A small sample of a typical color mixing experiment conversation, it is the names they give their colors that I think I enjoy the most.

Perhaps it is because I love their names so much, I took out paint samples and we looked at several different shades and colors of green. I read out what the paint companies name their greens, for some reason "greenbelt" got the most laughs.

 After we looked at the samples, the students were then given pallets of paint with yellow, blue, and white, and were again invited to mix as many different colors of green as they thought they could.

I love this exercise for many reasons. The children are learning how to create different colors, they are not merely relying on the color that comes from a paint tube, they themselves are making the color they want.  They are learning paint has different values and properties, and they are expanding their idea of a general concept; they know what green is, but as they mix, they are observing that there is not just one notion of green, there are many.  

  

It was interesting to see that my 4 and 5 year olds made color swatches similar to the sample cards, and that the 3 year olds did not do swatches, but they still created a painting that showed all their different variations of the color green.

Look at all those unique versions of green!

After they finished their paint mixing, we sat together and wrote down the names for the their colors.  They were numerous and diverse and will hopefully be displayed when we do our documentation board for our color mixing project.