Color Wheel Skies with Birch Trees - 5th Grade

 

My classes are studying color at the moment.  I had my fifth grades review the color wheel and it's order by creating skies using a grid a basis to paint their colors in.  Every two rows combined two colors that were next to each other on the color wheel.  Red-Orange, Orange-Yellow, Yellow-Green, etc...  I made up a chart with each color combination in order so they could visually see what colors went in what rows.  It really helped!  The chart helped them to see where to place their colors without getting confused.  I let them have a little artistic license with how they painted the rows in as long as they stayed in color wheel order. and stressed that our main objective was to be able to remember what colors were next to each other on the color wheel for future reference if they did not have a color wheel to look at.  I also made up small color wheels that I printed out and laminated so each student had their own to look at. 

 

the next step was to create some birch trees using a pulled paint technique.  There are a million demos out there for this technique.  The one we used was to take pieces of mat board that I cut up into rectangles that they could easily hold and dip the edge into black paint.  I poured a small amount of black paint into small plastic plates that I covered with tin foil.  When we were done using the black paint for the day I covered the plates with more tin foil to save it for another day.  I also saved the mat board pieces to reuse if they were still decent.  This saved a lot of prep time.  When we were done with the paint for good, I just took off the tin foil, threw it out and saved my plates for another day!  I have been using the same plastic plates since last year by using this technique!

They drew out their trees onto some white drawing paper and pulled the paint along the side of the trees using the mat board rectangles.  I did have the students practice their pulling technique because it needed to be a quick pull so they did not get too much paint on their tree.  We let them dry, then cut them out and glued the trees in place!  They came out really beautiful!  Enjoy! :)