Mondays are always a whirl of fun after the children have had a couple of days at home. It’s exciting for me as a teacher to see their bright smiling faces again. Every week sparks new interests that let the children share important ideas, questions, and thoughts they might have.
Twice a week, the children have group time where they work with the same children and teacher. It provides an amazing chance to form into smaller groups and have them focus in on particular subjects or activities. In the Jalapeño Peppers group time, we started with checking in at the cork board by hanging our beaded names on the tacks and singing a good morning song. We then went over to our velcro board to-do list so the children knew what to expect.
The objective of this activity is to teach the children about mixing paint colors. I introduced the children to the bags of paint and what colors we will be mixing. I then read the book Little Blue and Little Yellow by: Leo Lionni. It’s about a blue dot and yellow dot that are friends. They find out they make green when they hug each other and their colors mix. By looking at the cover of the book the children immediately realized that blue and yellow make green. As a group we added that information to the whiteboard where the children made hypothesis of what two colors mixed together would make. “Red+blue=purple, yellow+blue=red, black+white=thunder cloud, and red+yellow=pink.”
Children got a bag with two paint colors zipped inside and then they started to mix it up with their hands. As the colors began to come together the children mentioned the new colors they were seeing. They continued to write letters in the bag and mix the colors, while we talked about their previous color thoughts made on the whiteboard. They then concluded that “Red+blue=purple, yellow+blue=green, black+white=gray, and red+yellow=orange.”