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Candace Whitman Children's Books

ACTIVITY: Be a Color Detective!

AGE/STAGE: After children can know their colors and can paint. Recommended for no earlier than 4 and up; 8-9 is not too old.

TIME:     45 minutes

MATERIALS:  Paint Demonstration materials (tempera best, but any material that can blend will do); squares with different colors, with a large range of yellows, blues, greens, browns, etc. (These can be cut out from larger sheets or created by teacher with paint.) A variety of illustrated picture books.

Have children gather around a demonstration table.

INTRODUCTION
Discussion: Our world comes in a variety of colors.  What are some of the colors we see in nature? What are some colors we see in man-made things, such as the clothing you are wearing? Who has a favorite color?

Explanation: To an artist, the color yellow isn’t actually a color, but the name of a family of colors.  Each yellow is like a relative, like a brother, or a sister, or a cousin, that have the same last name. But each is distinct, it has something that makes it unique.

Let me do a demonstration to show you, and then we will have an activity that will help you be color detectives. A detective has to be good at seeing things that others miss, they have to be very precise in what they are looking for.  We will  learn to see the differences in colors that you might have thought were the same! 

DEMONSTRATION
The first thing I want to show you has to do with the color yellow. Like I said, there really isn’t only one yellow in the world, there are many, many kinds of yellow. 

( Paint three circles of yellow.)

For example, what happens if I add a tiny bit of red to yellow? (Demonstrate)  Again, what happens if I add a tiny bit of blue to yellow? (Demonstrate)

See, now these are all yellow, but different kinds of yellow. This is sort of an orangey, or crayon-box yellow, and this is sort of a greeny-yellow, like a pad of paper. Not quite green, but greeny yellow.

(DISPLAY OBJECTS SHOWING DIFFERENT YELLOWS)

Let’s try red. (Make three circles of red.)

What happens if I add a little blue to the red? (Demonstrate)

What happens if I add a little yellow to the red?  (Demonstrate)

Let’s come up with names for these colors. 

(Solicit names: Fire-engine red, dictionary red, red like my socks today)

Can you think of some fruits and vegetables that are these colors?
(Display objects as in season: tomato, apple, cranberry, grape, watermelon, cherry)

Can I also add black and white to a color and get other varieties?

Let’s see what happens with blue. (Demonstrate adding black and white to circles of blue.)

Can you think of some things that are these kinds of blue? (Light blue - sky, flowers; dark blue - blueberry, night time)

I can actually add any color to any color, and get a whole new color. And that's what artists do, to get just the right color for what they are painting.

(Add brown to yellow, and get mustard.) Display jar of mustard.

ACTIVITY

Now is your chance to take what you have just learned and be a color detective.  I’m going to give each of you a square that is a particular color.   Your job is to be a detective and find something in this room that matches that color very closely.

For example (select one card for demonstration), this is green, but not just any green. What color was added to green do you think to get this particular green?

(Give instructions for where to look for colors with appropriate behavior reminders.) You can look for colors any where in this room. To help you, I’ve put out some books here (or art posters) that have many different colors in them. Or maybe you will see your color on someone's clothing, or an object in the room.  When you find something that matches, come show me!

Give out colorful or other stickers when they have found their color.  Allow children to look again with a new square, or to color, etc, until all children have found their precise color to the best of their ability.

Closure

Read from Candace Whitman's Yellow and You, Ready for Red, or Bring on the Blue. Have them look for colors and their relatives in the illustrations.

Back to MY FIRST COLORS Books Page