1st Grade: Kandinsky color mixing

My favorite thing about this project is that I only give students the 3 primary colors of paint, and they come up with all of these amazing other colors.  They love it, too. :)  I show them the basics of how to make the secondaries and we talk about how to get brown, but the rest they magically do on their own!  We first fold paper to get the 8 square grid.  They start with red, yellow, and blue somewhere in their painting (either a dot or circle), and then they have to color mix to fill in the rest, trying to make each box different.  This is 2-3 day lesson. Sometimes I read them "The Dot" to go along with the idea of how something simple can become something great, and I show them the famous painting by Kandinsky.

1st Grade: Kandinsky Circles

I began this lesson by reading the students "The Dot" by Peter H. Reynolds.  Then I show Kandinsky's concentric cirles painting.  I show students how to fold their paper in half "like a hotdog" and then fold that in half, and then once more.  When opened, up they will see their eight squares.  When painting, they only start out with primary colors (red, yellow, blue) and have to mix them to get secondary and teriary colors.  Students love when they discover a new color like turquoise or magenta.  They have fun naming their own colors too- they come up with some pretty funny names. :)