A Little More Color

Coloring Celery

The same concept as with carnations, only you can see how the colors come up the celery stalk. The green (that Ellie put in what I thought was WAY too much food coloring) worked the best. Lesson learned, use a lot of coloring. It was interesting to listen to Brielle explain to James how the celery was drinking the water, she actually understood quite a bit.

Color Wheel

I still haven't unpacked all my art supplies, but we found enough to do a little project. In addition to cutting I had them practice tearing the paper. My idea was to have this as a collage in the shape of a rainbow, but the kids really wanted to do circles, so we were able to use the circle to create a color wheel to reinforce primary and secondary colors. (Just cut out the circles, and paste on another paper. We waited for these papers to dry on first, so I don't have pictures of the final project yet.)

Color Wheel Pancakes

I was looking at our pancakes and thinking they would make a great palate for mixing colors.

I got this frosting last year after Christmas.  It has been great to have on hand for writing letters on muffins or doing quick project.  Ellie loves any chance she gets to eat frosting, so she was a big fan.

Books

We always get a big selection at the library and then try them out to see what we like best.

I won't list everything, but our favorites ended up being:

Raindrops A Shower of Colors by Chieu Anh Urban

A great board book for younger kids, but also teaches color mixing

Lemons are NOT Red by Laura Vaccaro Seeger

Ethan loves saying NO. So I would ask 'are lemons red?' and he yells NO! All the kids really liked this one.

Color Dance by Ann Jonas

It is a little bit strange, but Ellie loved it. It teaches good concepts about mixing colors. The one we had was copyright in 1989, so I don't know if it was just old, but the red in the book looked quite pink. Other than that it was good. We always finished the book by singing what I know of The Spectrum Song (since the book actually mentions colors like chartreuse and aquamarine).

Colors by The Eyelike Series

Really good to show the spectrum of colors in nature, this was another of Ellie's top picks this week.

Color

We are not quite all the way unpacked and settled, but I'm ready for organized preschool time again, so we're back!

A note for those of you that are keeping track: I'm skipping the last few letters we had left of the alphabet. Brielle has known all the lowercase letters for a long time and is ready to move on, and it will be easier to plan activities to different ages and abilities if I go with a theme unit for the week rather than a specific letter.

So, for this week, the theme is Colors!

Goal for the little kids- learning to say and recognize the basic rainbow colors.

Goal for older kids-learn about shades, spectrums, primary and secondary colors

Each of the four kids has a definite favorite color. Luckily none of them are the same. Gavin likes Red, Brielle like Yellow, Lissy likes Blue, and Ethan likes Green. Anytime Ethan sees anything Green he runs to it and says 'MY'. Lissy sees something blue and emphatically says 'Coco, Blue'. Before Lissy picked blue as her favorite color we gave her the orange plate to eat from all the time, so Ethan still refers to anything orange as 'coco'.

And, some of our activities:

Crayon Making

It is messy, but fun.

Ethan and Lissy's preferred method of breaking up the crayons was with their teeth. Gross.

Color Words

Ellie got this See and Spell puzzle for Christmas and loves it.

We used the letters to practice spelling the colors.

Color Mixing

We've used food coloring before and mixed colors, but I loved doing it with ice. We could see the original primary colors that were used to make the secondary colors for a long time.

Color Wheel

Another color-mixing activity that the kids LOVED.

Colored Cookies

We made "Funfetti" cookies with rainbow sprinkles, but there are so many fun food things to do with color that I want to do still. A one-color themed meal (all green, blue, brown, etc.) Rainbow jello, Rainbow Cake, Playdough Cookies (we've done before), Edible Crayons...etc.

Memory

I picked up some paint sample cards which we got a lot of use from this week. We used them to play memory, go fish, matching colors around the house and using as flashcards.

Shades of Color

Again, the paint samples were used to talk about different shades of color and group darkest to lightest.

And shades of jellybeans.

Color Scavenger Hunt

Tuesday we went on a field trip to the arboretum and searched for colors in nature. Yes, I let the kids pick flowers, but only 1 each...we left the rest for everyone else to enjoy. We found blue peacocks, but decided they probably didn't want to have their feathers picked off for the picture.