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.

STEAM Sunday: Mix It Up!

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.

Herve Tullet makes amazing interactive books that I love reading aloud in storytimes and library classes, and I really enjoyed using Mix It Up! in MakerSpace last year. Color mixing is a great way to kick off art lessons, and if your supplies are limited, it's also a great way to show students they can make their "limited" colors go a lot further!

After experiencing the book together, I got out colored ice cubes. In clear cups, I had students tell me which colors to mix together, and guess which color they would melt together to make. You can also quiz them by asking "What cubes do I need to pick to make orange?"

For individual work, we had three cups of water at each work station, and three empty cups. I put drops of food coloring in each water cup - red, blue, and yellow. Students used eyedroppers to pull colored water and mix it into the empty cups. They had sturdy watercolor paper they could drip water on to make beautiful abstract works of art.

The idea, of course, was for them to make their own hues of orange, purple, and green, but the younger students really enjoyed making their own brand new colors. A way to keep this as a creative learning experience is to have them name their new colors and explain how they made it, as best they could. For example: "I made orablue, by mixing a little bit of red, a little bit of yellow, and even more blue."

I used this lesson for Early Childhood, Lower Elementary, and Upper Elementary students. There was a bit of a mess with all age groups, but I think there's a good way to use this with younger children and not worry about the mess. For Toddlers, you can put paint in ziploc bags and let them literally mix it up! Put red paint in the right side of the bag, blue paint on the left side, place the bag flat on a table, and let the kids smush the color together! Same with blue and yellow, and red and yellow.