Colour Schemes

In both Grade 5 and Grade 6 I have recently decided to work on colour schemes.  In Grade 5 I only focused on complimentary colours and monochramatic colours.  For their project, I simply had them choose one of the schemes, and make an abstract shape drawing.  This project took most students two, 1-hour periods to finish.  I highly recommend this project for two reasons: 1) A great bulletin board display!, 2) No prep and even a great filler if you need a quick art project!.

Here are the results:

Complimentary Colours - Blue and Orange

Complimentary Colours - Purple and Yellow

Complimentary Colours - Green and Red

Monochromatic - Orange

Monochromatic - Blue

For the Grade 6's I made the study of colour schemes a much bigger project.  The reason for this, is simply because Grade 6's focus for art this year is colour, whereas, Grade 5's focus is shape.  

The Grade 6's learned about the following colour schemes: monochromatic, complimentary, tertiary (only secondary colours or only primary colours), and analogous (closest shades/tints of colour on colour wheel) colours.  I began with having the students draw any picture they wanted on a big piece of paper, making sure they knew that there had to be detail in all areas of the paper.  They then had to fold the paper into quadrants. Each quadrant was going to be a different colour scheme.  I went through each quadrant slowly with the students so that they would truly understand the different colour schemes.  This was the first of two projects worked on for exploring colour schemes.

Here are some results:

Their second project was to take one of the four colour schemes and make an abstract watercolour painting with shapes, using that colour scheme only.

Here are some of those results:

Analogous 

Monochromatic

My favourite project of the three are definitely the watercolour paintings!  It was a great project to help students grow in their skills of mixing and blending colours with watercolour paints.  I am excited to brighten the art room with these paintings!  

Feel free to use any ideas, but please do leave a comment if you do!

Constellations

Space and planets is turning out to be my favourite Science unit so far.  For some reason, it seems that kids just have such an excitement to learn about the Solar System.  Last week we studied constellations.  To end off the week I had the students pick one of their favourite constellations for a small project.  I decided to buy a writing template and constellation information on TPT (Not something I do often - usually only when I plan a lesson last minute and are really in need for some ideas for help!).  Here's the link: Crazy About Constellations.   In the booklet, the idea was to make the constellations from golden stars on black paper.  I decided to add a little extra fun step with have the students drawing the stars with yellow and white crayons and then painting over them with black watercolour.

Here were some of  the results:

A perfect display for the hallway and a great way to end off a crazy week!

We've Got the Whole World...

Earth Day is coming up in a couple weeks and I decided to get a head start on a bulletin board.  I got this wonderful idea from The First Grade Parade Blog.  (Amazing blog, I must add!)

I simply got a painted hand print of each of my students' for the 'world', and printed off some of the words and used others letters for some.  I then added a few sentences of things that we can do to help our earth.  I am now providing students pieces of paper to write down their own ideas to add.

If you still need a quick, easy bulletin board before Earth Day, I would highly recommend something like this!