Joy School - Colours

The last unit in our Basics Theme was Colours. It was a very pretty day of Joy School, since everything was covered in bright, happy colours.

Lesson Time: The lesson covered the primary colours, secondary colours, and complimentary colours. We learned that there are even more colours than the usual red, blue, yellow, green, orange, purple, brown and black that they know the words for. Our host mom had made little colour squares and we put them in lines that went together from darkest to lightest. Yes, they were all 'purple' but they had names for the different shade of purple they were: magenta, violet, etc.

She included a memory game in her lesson. On the back of the red cards she had glued a black and white picture of an easily recognisable object. Then we turned all the colour swatches over, and the children chose one red card and one colour swatch.

If you matched the blank picture to the colour it should be, (like this evergreen tree, and a green colour swatch) you got to keep your match.

Singing Time: She had contacted us in advance and asked us to have our children wear one of the primary colours for an activity during singing time.

So wearing their colour, and sitting on their matching dot, we sang Our Primary Colours. When the song said the name of their colour, they stood up. When it was a different colour, they sat back down. Fun and active.

We also sang Colours of the Rainbow.

Story Time: There were lots of good choices for books that were about colors. We read these two:

This book is about a silly animal who can change the colour of his spots at will and wants to live in the zoo so he can show all the people. In the end, he decides that being in the circus would be even better.

This one is told from the perspective of a child who wonders why we don't call berries 'reds' or bananas 'yellows.' Very pretty illustrations.

Science Time: We learned about rainbows, and how when the sun shines through the water droplets in the air, the light makes a rainbow and you can see all the colours. Then she brought out a prism and a flashlight to show us how we could make a rainbow of our very own.

There was also a second half to the science time. She had test tubes filled with water that had been dyed in each of the primary colours. Then we mixed them together to create the secondary colours. The kids got to have a turn guessing what colour they thought different combinations would make, and they had fun with it.

At the end of our experiment with all the pretty results.

Snack Time: Could there be a more fun way to learn your colours than to do it with candy?

After dividing up the candy between the kids, our host would call out a colour, and if they had one of those in their bowls, they held it up for her to check, and then they got to gobble it up!

Art Time: Finger-painting! She gave each child a dab of each primary colour and they could create whatever art they wanted with it. My boy did his best to get only one finger dirty (above).

But other children were much more comfortable in the mess! Just to be clear, yes, the girl in this picture is shrieking, but she is doing it because she is so excited and happy she just can't control herself. Not because she was freaking out about the paint being on her hands!

One last art project: Each child was given a pinch of each colour of plasticine and they could mould it into whatever they chose. Most of them made rainbows.

Wiggle Time: This was so fun! We had just had a big dumping of snow, and so this mom got some squirt bottles from the dollar store and filled them with a solution of water and food colouring. We sent the kids outside and they coloured the snow! They loved this!