Painting Snow

It seems like we went from having no snow at all to having snow every week, several days a week, in the blink of an eye.  I don't mind the snow, but some days it is just too cold to go out and play in it, so we bring it inside.

Kate and I worked together to create a masterpiece with watercolor paints and the snow as our canvas.

 We did some color mixing and made orange, green, and purple snow.

Beautiful, don't you think?

Baking Soda Dough

 This is yet another Pinterest find.  I used one large underbed storage bin for both girls.  I gave them each two cups of baking soda, and then they added one little packet of Kool Aid for scent, a few drops of food coloring to match the color of their Kool Aid, and 1/4 cup of water.  Kool Aid reacts with baking soda, so we had a little bit of fizzing going on.

 They mixed it all up.

 The texture is crumbly and the scent is delightful.  They enjoyed playing with it just like this for a while.

 And then I gave them squeeze bottles full of vinegar.

 I had to refill those squeeze bottles a few times!

When all of the fizzing stopped, their red and blue sections had combined to make purple, and they added boats for an entirely different play experience.

Mouse Paint

Kate is learning the letter M this week.  There are so many different activities I'm hoping to do for M; it's just one of those letters I guess!  Today, we had fun with Mouse Paint by Ellen Stoll Walsh.

Kate helped me squeeze red, yellow, and blue paint into sandwich size bags to represent the puddles the mice create.

Then we had the mice jump into the puddles by adding more paint to represent a colored mouse into the correct puddle.  Once the mice were in the puddles, Kate went to work squishing the colors together to create new colors.

I taped the bags onto our sliding glass door, and Kate LOVED this.  She was WAY more excited about this than she was about mixing the paint colors.

 Kate draws a lot of circles these days.  Sometimes she calls them circles, sometimes she says they are ovals, and sometimes she tells me she made the letter O.

Whenever I show Kate the letter M, she turns it around and says it is a W.  I remember Collin doing this too, smart cookies.

*The outfit is one of Reagan's old dance costumes.

Complementary Colors Art Project

I have given up waiting for Blogger to restore my post about complementary colors.  I rewrote it. 

Mouse Magic by Ellen Stoll Walsh is a fun book about what happens when complementary colors get together.  Colors opposite one another on the color wheel are called complementary colors, and if you place any two complementary colors together, they will jump around for you (well, at least it looks like they jump around).  Not all colors are pure enough to work, but it's fun to try.

We also read Hello Red Fox by Eric Carle.   In this book, Little Frog's friends come for his birthday party and Mama Frog thinks all of the animals are the wrong color.  She can't see the complementary colors until Little Frog tells her to look at them longer.  This is a really neat book.  The reader is supposed to stare at the animal on each page and then look at a white page with a black dot in the center to hopefully see the complementary color.  Unfortunately, we can't seem to make this work.  We have tried many times, but our eyes just won't be tricked. 

We began our art project by looking at a color wheel and finding complementary colors.  The complementary colors are directly across from each other on the color wheel (red and green, yellow and purple, orange and blue).  C and R chose the two complementary colors they wanted to work with; C chose red and green and R chose yellow and purple.

I made masking tape designs on white card stock (only because I was out of plain white paper) and told C and R to paint over the entire paper (including over the tape) with their first color.

Once the paint dried, I carefully peeled off the masking tape.  C and R used thin paint brushes to fill in the white spots with the complementary colors. 

Here is their finished art:

 

Mixing Colors

R has known about primary colors and mixing them to create new colors for quite a while now, but we still enjoy the process.  Enjoy is an understatement for R; she loves to mix paint colors!

This week we read White Rabbit's Color Book by Alan Baker.  It is a cute book for preschool age children.  White Rabbit happens upon three big tubs of paint (red, yellow, and blue) and you can just imagine what happens next.  The book reminds me of Mouse Paint by Ellen Stoll Walsh - one of our favorite books!

After reading this book, I couldn't resist doing some color mixing.  I made three copies of White Rabbit on white card stock and R mixed paint on each copy to retell the story.

If you know R, then you know that she could not resist getting her hands in the paint.

We now have an orange rabbit, a purple rabbit, and a brown rabbit; you will have to read the book to find out why the last one is brown!!!

I am linking this to stArt (story + art = a great start) at A Mommy's Adventures.  Head on over there to find more fun book projects!

Separating Colors

Leave it to science to prove me wrong.  Recently, we read a few color mixing themed books and, of course, we mixed colors after reading them.  We mixed with paint and play dough.  After telling my kids that we could not separate colors once they are mixed together, I found a few science experiments that do just that!  We still can't separate the colors from the paint or play dough that we mixed, but it was fun to try these science experiments.  This is the most successful of the experiments we tried:

Materials needed:
-yellow, red, and blue food coloring
-a bowl for mixing the food coloring (and something to mix it with)
-glass jar
-coffee filter
-paint brush
-pencil
-paper clip
-water

For the experiment, we put a drop each of red, yellow, and blue food coloring in a bowl and mixed them together.  We observed the color of the mixture - black.  Then we cut a strip of a coffee filter a little longer than the jar we used and put a dot of the mixed colors about one inch up from the bottom of the strip (we used a paintbrush to do this).

Next we secured the top of the strip around a pencil with a paper clip and added about a 1/2 inch of water to the jar.

We dangled the strip in the jar so the bottom of the strip just touched the water.  The water traveled up the paper and amazingly, when it reached the dot, the colors separated.

It was difficult to capture this in a picture, but you can kind of see the red and blue, and a thin streak of yellow in between the red and blue.  According to the book we used, different pigment molecules travel at different speeds and that is why you see separate paths of color.  I was much more interested in this than C and R were, and it took four tries to get this to happen.  The first time I didn't read the directions correctly (great teacher I am!), the second time someone knocked over the jar and water spilled all over our materials, the third time there was crying for some reason so we stopped, and finally (I can't believe I didn't give up before the fourth try) we got results with the fourth try. 

Speaking of the book, the title is Super Science Concoctions by Jill Frankel Hauser.  I recently saw this book mentioned on the Almost Unschoolers blog.  We are hoping to try a few more experiments from this book before returning it to the library.

I am linking this to Science Sunday at Adventures in Mommydom.  Visit that blog for more science fun.

Letters & Colors

The last time we did a color mixing activity, I got a comment from The Dairy Queen that inspired me to do this fun activity. She recommended making different colored ice and letting the colors melt together to create new colors. I decided to use our alphabet ice cube trays to add letter recognition to the experiment.

I mixed food coloring and water in the ice cube trays to create red, yellow, and blue ice. C and R took turns picking ice cube letters of different colors and putting them in bowls to melt. We had white bowls set up all over the table because we had 26 ice cubes to mix.

They swirled the ice for a while and enjoyed watching the colors melt together to create new colors. This might be even more fun on a hot day, but our New England weather has not been very hot this summer.

I am linking this to the Preschool Corner this week! Head on over to that blog and find out what other preschool children are learning.

Color mixing

This week, C and R have been learning about primary colors. We read three books that introduce primary colors and color mixing: Mouse Paint by Ellen Stoll Walsh, Warthogs Paint by Pamela Duncan Edwards and Henry Cole, and Little Blue and Little Yellow by Leo Lionni.

We own Mouse Paint and Little Blue and Little Yellow, but we borrowed Warthogs Paint from the library after I read about how much Emily at A Mommy's Adventures enjoyed the book. I definitely recommend all three books.

I cut white paper in half and gave C and R each three pieces. C painted one piece red, one piece yellow, and one piece blue and then painted over each of those with another color to create orange, green, and purple. If you ask R how to make orange, green, or purple, she will give you the correct answers but she was more interested in mixing all of the colors together than trying to create specific colors.
We also mixed blue, yellow, and red food coloring with water in glasses and used medicine droppers to transfer the colored water and create new colors. They could have done this all day long.
I am so happy to be linking this post to the Preschool Corner. Be sure to check out the other posts.