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Mixing colours to paint a colour wheel
momstown's mixing and matching in our programs this month - what better medium than paint to get mixing?
Make a colour wheel with your child - they will love the 'magic' effect of mixing colours, and also learn colour theory along the way.
What you need:
- Paint in primary colours (red, yellow, blue)
- White paper
- Pencil
First, draw a circle and separate into 6 'pie slices'. Explain to your painter that they will be painting each slice a different colour. I wrote the primary colours in three different slices (make sure you skip a slice in between) so my painter could practice recognizing the words as well as painting.
We started off painting the primary colours...
And I had intended him to paint the three primary colours first, but he was too excited to see what happened when we mixed the paints!
Have your child predict what colour they think they will make when they mix the paint - and then they can see for themselves if they're right!
When you've completed your colour wheel, you can go back and talk about which colours mixed together to make the secondary colours - and it looks pretty nice too!
If you want another way to make a colour wheel, try plasticine. It's a great medium that mixes colours just like paint, and using a paper plate and primary colours, you can make a colour wheel - it's self-sticks onto the plate.
When a coffee filter is coloured with washable markers, and then lightly sprayed with water, you can watch as the marker colours separate, spread, and mix. The process is mesmerizing to watch, and is the perfect opportunity to discuss how primary colours can be combined to create new colours, and to demonstrate that secondary colours such as purple are the made up of primary colours.
Right before their eyes, kids can see red and yellow becoming orange, and green separating into yellow and blue. We used the coffee filter technique to create unique Valentines of our own this week, but we added a twist.
This nursery rhyme is brought to life with detailed illustrations of the three feisty little kittens who can’t seem to keep track of their mittens! A nice accompaniment to our 
Great way to teach colour identification.
Dig them out and use them to teach colour sorting. If you have different sizes of eggs, you can do size sorting as well!
Buttons, ribbon scraps, cancelled stamps, bandaids... things you have clogging up your junk drawer can become a teaching tool! Use a clear container to hold them, and have your child sort, count, match - and learn. Thanks to 
Muffin tins are a great sorting tool - the right size for little hands to sort into. 
Make your own 
Print out the templates. Glue the base template onto a piece of construction paper to make a nice frame around the picture.
Colour the shapes with markers or crayons first, then cut out from the template. Some shapes may need adult assistance to cut out.
Then, have kids match up the shapes that they've coloured and cut out, to the base template. This is a great time to talk about the names of different shapes!