Mrs. Atkin's Kindergarten

As we finished our study on colors, the students had been noticing the beautiful leaves on the ground. The ground has been full of leaves and the students have enjoyed throwing them in the air and even making "leaf angels".

Since the students began noticing the changes that come with fall we decided it would be great to use our outdoor "Discovery Garden" to sketch one of the beautiful trees on our playground. I modeled sketching a beautiful tree, adding details of bare branches, different colored leaves, colors of the bark and much more.

Each child had a clip board, and the students split up into groups to share colored pencils.

They studied every aspect of the trees before sketching.

We look forward to taking a walk this week to collect different colored leaves to graph and use as classroom decorations. We also look forward to looking at the signs of Fall at Tuken's Farm and Market this Friday.

As we finished up our study and investigations on colors this week the students wanted to create a color wheel. We actually made two!

We began with a blank color wheel on the easel. The students helped me out by recalling previous experiments to know where the colors go on the wheel. We labeled the primary colors with a numbers (1, 2, 3) and the secondary colors with a dash (--) mark.

The students were thrilled to see the Play-Dough I made the previous evening. (I will post the recipe at the end of the post for anyone interested.) We looked at the color wheel and recalled upon previous experiments and experiences to remember what colors we needed to mix. I tried mixing small amounts of Play-Dough, which is what you see me sticking to the board in the picture below.

Each student was given two colors of play-dough. They mixed the play-dough until they had the perfect secondary color.

The students pressed, kneaded, and smashed the two colors together to make a new color.

When all the colors were represented, we pressed the Play-Dough onto a piece of paper to make a Play-Dough color wheel.

I took the color wheel home, baked in the oven for 20 minutes at 250 degree. I added a coat of clear sealer, and we can now have it in our classroom as a document of our color investigations.

The second color wheel needed first to be painted.