Friday, February 17, 2017

Northern Lights

I love how this activity turned out, and as much as I hate the mess that comes along with chalk pastels, I will definitely do this one again. To begin we did a little science learning about what the northern lights actually are and how they occur.  You can find some fairly simple videos on youtube for this, I did this with fourth grade, so I thought it was an important step.  If I was doing this with younger students I might just show them images of the northern lights, and discuss where they can be seen.  This activity was done in two parts, white chalk and charcoal on grey paper for the polar bears and bright colored chalk on black paper for the lights.  So first, the lights: Students looked at images of the lights on a slide show I created, and then we discussed analogous colors, why and how they blend together so well, and how to find them on the color wheel.   Once students drew the lights we then painted trees with black tempera paint.  The second step was to create a polar bear head, and for this we also studied a photo from the internet of a polar bear to help with shape and details.  We drew with pencil first, colored with white chalk then went over the pencil with black charcoal and used out finger to blend a bit.  I found this awesome lesson here. It is one of my favorite blogs!












Mouse Paint




Students in my 2nd grade class have been learning about color theory this week.  I read to them a favorite book called Mouse Paint by Ellen Stoll Walsh.  It is a great book for introducing color mixing to the little ones.  I love books like this that are short and sweet, but also fun for reading to the kids.  Last year we did an activity where the students drew the mice with payons (crayon and paint combined) They work like water color pencils, the students drew and colored 6 mice using only the primary colors, but this year I wanted to switch it up.  Since model magic comes in the primary color packs I thought this would be a fun way to get them to learn about color theory.  each student started with  red, yellow and blue Model Magic. We mixed one color at a time, first we swirled two colors like red and yellow together and set it aside.  Next we combined the rest of the red and yellow together to make a smooth orange.   We then placed the swirled colors on top of the orange to make it look like the mice were mixing the color, just like the book.  My students LOVE playing with model magic, and i love it too because it mixes so well, and is not messy to clean up! A huge plus with the little ones! Lots of fun but no fuss:)