Guest Post - Colour Mixing Activities

 


Shelly and her kids enjoy some lovely colour mixing activities in this guest post, including creating a colour wheel family of snails!

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Colour Mixing Activities

By Shelly

There is something about being out in the garden in the late summer and seeing all the vibrant colours that makes me think of colour mixing. So over the weekend while we were out in the garden we dug out a colour mixing chart and the kids and I had some fun matching the colours on the chart to the items in our garden. I do love this because often if you find an orange flower you can notice in some of the creases that it is darker almost a red and have you noticed how many blue flowers can appear purplish in different light?

Activity Village colour mixing chart (US spellings)
Activity Village colour mixing chart (US spellings)

On one of our garden breaks we decided to make our own colour wheel. We used a paper plate as our base.  We started by folding the paper plate in half and then divided each half into 3 sections (you want 6 sections on your paper plate – 3 for the primary colours and 3 for the secondary colours). When you write the colour words on the plate make sure that you leave a gap between each primary colour.

And then paint the edges. As it is a colour mixing activity I only put out red, blue and yellow paints and the kids had to mix their own orange, green and purple (if you do this make sure that the kids have some scrap paper to test out their colours before they add it to the wheel).

Making a colour paint wheel - in progress
Making a colour paint wheel - in progress

Our finished colour wheel
Our finished colour wheel

You can also use the colour wheel to show the kids what the complimentary colours are (the colours that are opposite each other – red and green, blue and orange, purple and yellow) as well as which colours are warm colours and which are cool colours – the wheel naturally groups the red, orange and yellow on one side and the blue, green and purple in the other.

Painting our colour mixing Scotties
Painting our colour mixing Scotties

My kids (especially my youngest) always loves an opportunity to mix paint colours together so we decided to make some multi-coloured Scotties.  We downloaded the Scottie templates for the three secondary colours and then the kids painted them. But we stuck to three colours per Scottie (the secondary colour plus the two primary colours that made up the secondary colour).  So our green Scotty was a combination of green, blue and yellow and our orange Scottie was a combination of orange, red and yellow.

Colour mixing Scotties green and orange
Colour mixing Scotties green and orange

It really was just a fun painting activity and we ended up with some very abstract multi-coloured Scotties. My youngest also did a different variation where he painted the background in the two primary colours and then painted the Scottie in the secondary colour.

Colour mixing purple Scottie
Colour mixing purple Scottie

You could do a similar activity with the colour blob pages or even the colour kites.

And as often happens once my kids start painting we tend to go all out!

Colour mixing activities in full swing!
Colour mixing activities in full swing!

They also decided to create a colour wheel family of snails (I had printed out some snail templates to use in a minibeast crafting activity). The kids used the primary colours for the bigger snails (according to my son these are the parent snails) and used the secondary colours for the smaller snails.

A colourful family of snails!
A colourful family of snails!

I love the idea of only giving the kids the three primary colours (and possibly some white so they can lighten the colours) and then they get to experiment with creating their own colours.  You really could use any template for this (we recommend any of the animal ones for colour mixing).

And if the kids are enjoying the colouring mixing you can always download some colour mixing worksheets for them to complete or explore the rest of the Colour topic.

Colour mixing worksheet from Activity Village for the kids to complete
Colour mixing worksheet for the kids to complete

Out and About with our Scavenger Hunts

This is a guest post from Shelly. Shelly is a home educating parent of two children aged 6 and 9. She blogs at ofamily learning together where she shares ideas on the different learning activities that they do including lots of hand-on Maths, arts and crafts and anything else that is part of their home educating lifestyle.

You can find more guest posts by Shelly, and a list of all our guest posts, here.

 

Guest Post - Colour Mixing Activities

Colour mixing activity ideas by Shelly for Activity Village

Wednesday, 5th September 2018

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