Color Study

We're winding up our color studies. It's been a fascinating and motivating subject for the fine young gents. Which isn't surprising when you think about it. Color is immediate and relevant. It's something we experience every moment. A color study combines, overlaps and intersects art and science, and the experiments are simple, fun and accessible. And memorable. The fine young gents often talk about color in terms of science and art, remarking at the red light waves that must be bouncing off a shirt, for example. On the way home from a visit to Grandpa's, kindergarten gent stared out at the brown hills and remarked, "Mom, I can't see any tertiary colors out there."

At the beginning of spring break, we spent some school time doing color experiments. We're moving on to an astronomy study this spring, but we didn't want to miss some of the fun activities we'd seen online and in our experiment books, so we spent a fair amount of time playing with color.

Catch a Rainbow from Kidzone Science:

You need:
A shallow bowl
Milk
Food color--red, blue and yellow
Dish soap
Printable recording sheet (optional)

Drop food color at the edges of the bowl as shown above. Add 2-3 drops of dish soap to the middle of the bowl. Sit back and watch the colors swirl and combine.
Then complete the record sheet:


Is Black Black?
(Pictured in notebook above.)

You need:
Black markers, 2-3 different brands
A coffee filter
Water and an eyedropper
A tray or dish

Cut the coffee filter into strips. Choose one brand of black marker, and color a big black dot at the edge of a coffee filter strip. Do the same with the other black markers until you have a dotted strip for each brand of marker. Set the strips in your tray or dish and drip water on the black dots until they are saturated. Make sure your strips are not touching so that the colors don't bleed onto one another. Wait for the colors to wick up the filter. What colors do you see? Are the colors used by each brand different? The same?

Color Filters

You need:
Colored cellophane, different colors
Paper
Markers
Flashlight (optional)

Using your markers, draw a rainbow (or other colorful picture) on your paper. Place different colors of cellophane over your picture. What happens to the colors? Now take your cellophane and place it over different colored objects in the room. What happens to those colors?

For more cellophane fun, take the colored cellophane and a flashlight into the closet or other dark place. Shine the flashlight through the cellophane. (Moms: This kept my fine young gents entertained for an hour.)

Make a Rainbow

You need: A prism and bright light

Find a prism and experiment with making rainbows in the sunlight.



Color Mixing

You need:
4-6 glasses or bowls
Water
Food color--red, yellow, blue
Eyedroppers, spoons, measuring cups
Tray and towels or rags

Place the glasses and bowls on a tray. Fill three glasses or bowls with water. Add several drops of red, yellow or blue food color to the glasses so that you've got one glass of each color. Set out the the colored water and extra glasses or bowls for mixing. Use the spoons, measuring cups and eyedroppers to mix colors! Make sure to have a rag handy to clean up spills!

Science: Color and Vision

Last week we took a slight detour from our science and art color study to explore color and vision. We finally got to try the Bird in a Cage experiment from one of my new favorite experiment sights, Exploratorium Science Snacks. Not snacks for the tummy, snacks for the brain! Quick and simple science experiments, complete with thorough explanations. Perfect for filling 15-20 minutes.

You need:
Posterboard or thin cardboard (Scraps work just fine.)
Colored paper--red, blue and green
White paper
Pencil and scissors
Black marker
Bright light--Try this on a sunny day for best results!

Draw a silhouette of a favorite animal onto the posterboard. Cut it out and use it as a template to trace your animal onto the red, blue and green papers. Cut out your colored animal shapes and glue them to your white paper. (We used the science notebook pages.) On another white paper, draw a birdcage, jungle, or other habitat for your animal using the black marker. Place your pages in bright light and stare at one colored animal for about 30 seconds. Then stare at your cage (or other habitat). What do you see?

You should see an afterimage, a colored image of your bird. Your white paper reflects blue, red and green light. You've tired the cones in your eye sensitive to the color at which you've been staring, so you see the other colors more strongly. If your red-perceiving cones are tired from staring at the red bird, for example, the blue- and green-perceiving cones are stronger, so you should see more blue-green light bouncing off the page, which creates a blue-green afterimage.

A common variation on the afterimage experiment uses the American flag. Create an American flag using black and green stripes, and black stars on an orange background. (Directions here.) After staring at your flag, then directing your eyes to a white page, you should see the traditional red, white and blue American flag.
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3D Stereograms: Magic Eye


Magic Eye, by Magic Eye, Inc.
Check Magic Eye books out of the library. They will keep the kids entertained for what seems like hours. It's fun snuggling on the couch staring at the pages, trying to get the seemingly random patterns on the page to pop out into 3D pictures. Having trouble? Read this: How to see 3D for an explanation of how it works.

Then make your own stereograms online:
Create your own 3D stereogram
This application lets you draw your own picture and choose your colors. We're having a blast with this. The fine young gents drew their names and printed their personal stereograms to paste into their science notebooks.

Choose from different backgrounds and pictures at Easy Stereogram Builder. (The stereogram above was created using this site.) Then read about how they work. There's a great explanation of stereo vision here: What is Stereo Vision?
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We love Bill. Watch Bill Nye the Science Guy: Light and Color for some color and light science fun.

"Bill! Bill! Bill! Bill!"

Spinning Color Wheels

Spinning Color Wheels

You Need:
Posterboard or light cardboard
A pencil and a ruler
Scissors
Crayons
A sharp point to poke a hole in the cardboard (The pencil will do in a pinch.)
A straw and a craft brad OR string OR a pushpin and a wooden dowel, optional
(Shirts also optional if you're at home and it's sunny out.)

Trace a circle onto your posterboard or cardboard. Using your ruler divide your circle evenly into sections (this makes a fun mini math lesson!) like the picture shown above, or like this:
For one side of your circle, choose two primary colors, or two complementary colors (colors opposite one another on the color wheel), and color the sections of your circle alternating colors. On the other side of your wheel, color the sections using colors of your choice.

Once your circle is colored, poke a small hole through the very center. Use the hole to poke your craft brad, push pin, or string through your circle.

Craft brad and straw: Poke a small hole into the straw, insert the pointed end of the brad that's already sticking through the circle, and widen the ends of the brad so that it won't slip back through the straw. Spin the wheel!
Push pin and dowel: Poke the end of the pushpin through the center of the circle into the dowel. Make sure it's pushed in firmly so that it won't fall off. Spin the wheel!
String: Thread the string through the center of the circle. Holding both ends of the string (one end in each hand), swing the circle around and around, twisting the string. Pull the string tight and watch your wheel spin!
Or....just spin your wheel!

What happens if you use two primary colors? What happens when you use complementary colors?

Why does it work?
Color and Spinning Wheels at Newton BBS Ask a Scientist.

This is a simple project, and lots of fun! We used this lesson plan: Spinning Color Wheels from Crayola.com. It calls for using string through the center of the circle. We used several kinds of string and yarn, and attempted to fasten our circles to the string in various ways, but we could not get our circles to wind tightly enough on the string. They just flopped around and refused to spin. It wasn't time wasted. We found all kinds of techniques and materials that just won't work. Next we experimented a little with methods we've used in the past for other projects: A straw with a craft brad was just the ticket for preschool gent, kindergarten gent used a push pin and a wooden dowel, and their older brother cut straight to the chase, deciding to forgo the spinners altogether and spinning his circle on the floor instead.

Check this out! Color Matters--Amazing Science of Colors. Chockful of information, experiments and color facts, including Color Matters for Kids.

More science, art and vision fun for adults: Here's a fascinating web exhibit entitled Color Vision and Art: Vision Science and the Emergence of Modern Art.

Color Study:Shades

You Need:
White paper (we folded our papers in half lengthwise to create narrow strips)
White paint, black paint and one other paint color of your choice
Paintbrushes
Paint tray, old yogurt cups or lids, or something similar for paint mixing
Newspaper
A rag or two in case of spills

Prepare your area by setting down newspapers, setting out your materials, and choosing your paint colors and brushes.

Read Color(Step-By-Step Science) by Robert Snedden and Sabrina Crewe. This is the best kids' book on the science of color that we've found so far. It's got thorough and colorful explanations of different aspects of color, and several color-related activities and experiments, including step-by step directions for making a shade chart.

Squirt two big squirts of your chosen color paint onto your mixing tray.

In the middle of your paper, paint a stripe of your chosen color.

Squeeze a drop or two of white paint into one of your squirts of color, and mix thoroughly. What happens to your color? Paint a stripe of that color onto your paper, to the left of your original color. Mix in a few more drops of white paint. Paint another stripe to the left. Continue mixing in a few more drops of white and painting new stripes until you reach the left edge of your paper.

Now try the same thing in the other squirt of your original color, this time with the black paint. Be careful to start with only one drop of black! Black can quickly overpower your original color, so it's better to start with one drop each time, then add another if you need to. Paint a stripe of that color onto your paper, this time to the right of your original color. Continue mixing in a drop or two of black and painting new stripes of color until you reach the right edge of your paper.


Set aside your shade chart to dry. Try another color! Or make another shade chart by mixing your color with its complementary color (the color opposite your color on the color wheel) instead of using black or white. What happens? What happens if you mix your color with a color adjacent to it on the color wheel?
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Color Wheel and Color Mixing at Enchanted Learning

Lesson Plan: Tints, Tones and Shades

Science and Art: Color Lesson

Read Color, Ruth Heller. There's a clear and colorful explanation of printing using four colors: Yellow, cyan, magenta and black. Or find another simple explanation to read (like this one, The Science of Light: Made from Dots).


Dotty Dots: You need a pencil, a piece of white paper, a yellow marker, a red marker, and a blue marker (preferably a cyan blue rather than a royal blue). Draw three circles with a gray pencil on the white piece of paper. In one circle, use the red and blue marker tips to make red dots and blue dots, as close together as you can get without overlapping. In another circle, do the same with the blue and the yellow markers, and use red and yellow dots to fill in the third circle. Look at the circles close up--can you see the separate colors? Now ask another person to hold up your paper as you look at it from across the room. Can you still see separate dots of different colors, or do they blend to look like one color?

Colors under the microscope: Look at a variety of pictures--photographs, postcards, books--with a magnifying glass and under the microscope. Do you see tiny dots used to make the rainbow of colors? Now look at a part of a printed photo or postcard that looks white. What do you see under the microscope?

The Side Show (detail), Georges Seurat

Bonus Lesson: Read about Georges Seurat. His art was influenced by the science of color. Look closely at his pictures, and you'll see that they're composed of tiny dots of pure color.

Wordless Wednesday: Color wheel

Tuesday Ten: What We're Reading

I'm Reading:

Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades: The Complete Guide to Organic Gardening, Steve Solomon.

It's garden season. Last week I got out and started digging up my garden boxes. It's time to plant peas, and soon I'll be planting spinach and potatoes. Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades is my new garden bible because it's written specifically for this wet temperate region. In other vegetable news, I called the Food for Lane County Youth Farm to sign up for a CSA box again this year. I can't wait!

Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics: Teachers' Understanding of Fundamental Mathematics in China and the United States (Studies in Mathematical Thinking and Learning.), Liping Ma.

"Mathematical knowledge is based on both convention and logic. However, convention...serves as a shelter for those who don't have a conceptual understanding of a mathematical procedure." (p. 31) Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics was mentioned on a homeschool message board, and it's not available at our library, so I bought it. So far it's fascinating. This book is worth a separate post of its own. I hope to get to that soon.

A Collection of Math Lessons, Grades 1-3 (Math Solutions Series), Marilyn Burns and Bonnie Tank.

A Collection of Math Lessons showed up while I was looking on Amazon.com for the Liping Ma book, and this book is available from the library. It's got hands-on activties designed to stimulate mathematical creativity and problem-solving. The fine young gents and I have done the first math lesson, math necklaces, and it was great fun all around. Also worthy of a separate post.

Read-Alouds:

Mary Poppins, P. L. Travers.

I finished Mary Poppins last night. We were all a little sad. The fine young gents were charmed by the Banks children and their magical adventures with Mary. Second-grade gent's favorite chapter was the visit to the zoo, kindergarten gent still asks questions about Michael's bad day, and preschool gent wants me to re-read the visit to Uncle Wigg who went rolling and bobbing about the ceiling. As for me, well, I found myself delightedly exclaiming as I started each new chapter, "Oh, this is one of my favorite chapters in any book, ever!"

The Magic Pocket: Selected Poems, Michio Mado, Anno Mitsumasa, and Empress Michiko.

The Magic Pocket is lovely Japanese poems translated into English. The orginal Japanese is printed on the facing page. The elder lovely lady is teaching her brothers Japanese, so I keep my eye out for library books that they might enjoy. She's been reading some of these lovely poems in English to the fine young gents, and in Japanese to herself, delighted that she can read them in their orginal versions.

The fine young gents are reading:

Wag a Tail, Lois Ehlert.
Lois Ehlert is a favorite of the fine young gents. Our youngest gent has had this on the shelf by his bed for a couple weeks now, and he's fascinated by the dogs and their adventures.



Planting a Rainbow, Lois Ehlert.
Gardening and colors. A perfect companion to our soon-to-be-spring studies. The illustrations, of a garden planted in a rainbow of flowers, are bold and simple, beautiful and accurate.

Is It Red? Is It Yellow? Is It Blue?, Tana Hoban.
There are no words in this book, just color circles at the bottom of each page of the brightly colored photos of a city. I checked this out from the library to go with our color studies, and the fine young gents keep pulling it off the shelf and poring over the pictures. It's bright, colorful and engaging, perfect for all ages.

Divide and Ride (MathStart 3), Stuart J. Murphy and George Ulrich.

These MathStart books are a fun way to introduce and reinforce math concepts. One of the gents chose this book at the library, and it's been floating around the house ever since. With no prompting from me, I might add. They've got fine math minds and they think it's fun. I still scratch my head about that one. How is it that my children love math? Actually, I don't scratch my head, I think I know why. But that's another post too.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J. K. Rowling.

Second-grade gent has decided he's ready to tackle number four. He read the second and third books in the Harry Potter series last year, then decided to take a break because they were getting scary and longer. Two weeks ago, he mentioned that he might like to read The Goblet of Fire, so I made him a deal: Not only will he get to watch the movie after he reads the book, I'll read the fifth book as a read-aloud once he's finished the fourth. Last week we had a Potter-a-thon and watched the first three movies, and yesterday he started Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. He's already captivated.

Science and Art: Color

Last week, we started our color study with an art project as basic as you can get: Think of something brightly colored. Choose colors from the crayon box and draw it. We have two beautiful drawings of rainbows and a paper with circles and L-E-V-I written all over hanging on the fridge.

We read about wavelengths of light in The Visual Encyclopedia of Science (DK).
Explanations of light and color online:
Visible light waves at the NASA website for kids
How Are Rainbows Formed? at Science Kids
Lightwaves and Color at The Physics Classroom (for older children or for adults)

Next, a color wheel study. Kid Zone Science has some nice material, including The Color Wheel, a colorful explanation of primary and secondary colors and a color wheel worksheet.

Today's study, a simple science study of color: Coffee filter colors

You need a coffee filter, markers, an eyedropper and water. A paper plate, thick paper towel, or baking sheet is nice too, as it keeps the inks from bleeding onto your work surface. Color large dots or thick lines of single colors on your coffee filter. Drop water on the ink dots with the eyedropper. It's fun to watch the colors wick across the filter, so take some time to observe. Set aside the filter to dry. Once it's dry, observe what's happened to the colors, especially at the edges. We discovered that our colored inks separated into different colors. We used Crayola markers and they worked dandy. The best color markers for the experiment: Brown, which separated into orange-pink-purple-blue, and green, which spread into a vivid blue edged with the faintest line of yellow.

The fine young gents recorded the results in their science notebooks using this form. It's a great all-purpose science form for young students. Students to make a prediction, observe, and come to a conclusion based on the observation, which, when you think about it, is the nuts and bolts of a science experiment.

A color study lends itself to a blending of art and science, and since we had all of the materials on the table we ended with coffee filter butterflies. Color with marker on a coffee filter. Use lots of bright colors! Drop water droplets onto the colors with the eyedropper and set aside the coffee filter to dry. Once the coffee filter is dry, scrunch the filter into a decorated doll clothespin. Add pipe cleaner antennae or tie a ribbon around the top to hang your butterfly.


Next week's art studies:
Color mixing and the Color Wheel from Enchanted Learning
Actual color mixing, and creating color wheels based upon these lesson plans: Color Wheel and Twelve Color Wheel

Upcoming science experiments and notebook entries:
Catch a Rainbow (also from Kid Zone Science)
Spinning Color Wheels from Crayola
A drawing of light wavelengths copied from our science encyclopedia
Bird in a Cage at Exploratorium's Science Snacks
The Science of Light at the Annenberg/CB Math and Science Project Teacher's Lab
Create a rainbow with the prism we've got stashed around here somewhere, and maybe with the hose too if we get a day that's sunny and warm enough.

Reading:
Color, Ruth Heller (This is a great explanation of color in printing and as a general color study. Fantastic!)
Mouse Paint, Ellen Stoll Walsh (Lovely intro to color mixing for younger readers.)
White Rabbit's Color Book, Alan Baker (Another wonderful color mixing book for younger kids.)
Color Me Science (Experiment With Science), New Book of Popular Science. (On request from the library.)

Memory Poem Books

What is Pink?

by Christina Rossetti

What is pink? A rose is pink
By the fountain's brink.
What is red? A poppy's red
In its barley bed.
What is blue? The sky is blue
Where the clouds float through.
What is white? A swan is white
Sailing in the light.
What is yellow? Pears are yellow,
Rich and ripe and mellow.
What is green? The grass is green,
With small flowers between.
What is violet? Clouds are violet
In the summer twilight.
What is orange? Why, an orange,
Just an orange!

Make a memory poem book

You need:
A poem
Blank papers
Colored pencils or crayons

Fold your papers in half to create your book. Copy one line or stanza of your poem on each page. Illustrate that page. The next day, read what you've written in your book before you move on to write and illustrate the next line. By the end of the poem, you'll have it memorized! Once your book is finished, punch holes in the fold and tie your book together with yarn or string. Voila!

Kindergarten gent memorizes his poems quickly and easily, and he ends up with a beautiful book that he's proud to share with others. Try What is Pink? by Christina Rossetti, A Apple Pie by Kate Greenway, 1, 2 Buckle My Shoe or choose another poem that you love!

Classic Poems for Children

Poetry Foundation

Explorations 4 kids: Poetry