STEAM Sunday: Monsters Love Colors

When I was a joint MakerSpace teacher + librarian, I loved using books as my jumping off points for MakerSpace lessons. Books are my comfort zone, and reading a book aloud to start a lesson is a great way to introduce a concept and get everyone on topic. These "lessons" don't have to be done for an entire classroom, and don't even have to be done the way I outline them here, but I thought it would be something fun to share.

Piggybacking off the last STEAM Sunday: Mix It Up! is another color mixing lesson with Monsters Love Colors by Mike Austin. I used this with Early Childhood students, ages 3-6, because it's a bit sillier and younger than Mix It Up! I'm sure it could be adapted to be used with older students, but since Mix It Up! worked so well with older kids, I didn't worry about aging this title up.

Monsters Love Colors is a fun, silly way to incorporate a little movement ("Mix, dance, and wiggle!") into a read-aloud before you get your lesson started. Since we had done the Mix It Up! lesson with colored water the week before, students already knew color mixing basics. That's just one reason I loved that this title was more fun - they had a good time wiggling and sharing their knowledge, and it was also an engaging refresher course.

For this hands on activity, there was a plate of paint at each work station: red, blue, and yellow. I originally did this lesson in Fall, so the challenge was to take those three colors and paint "Five Little Pumpkins" (which we read in library that week - tying it all together!). This meant they had to make orange and green. It was a lot of fun to see students draw their own pumpkins and then color them in. 

There are a lot of challenges you can do with color mixing that don't depend on a season, so have fun thinking up things students can draw that require purple, orange, and green paint.