Circles, Circles Everywhere!

A sample of the students work by Itala, Melanie, Alex, Mitch and Rafael

The second graders have been experimenting with paint over the last several weeks. I challenged Mrs. Huffman's class to create a painting with as many colors and circles as possible. It took us 3 weeks to finish, but our paintings are absolutely beautiful!

by Mitch

Students started off by using the primary colors (red, yellow, and blue) to fill their paper with as many circles as they could using tempera paint. Next they used the color wheel to guide them as they mixed the primary colors together to create secondary colors (orange, green, and violet). The fun part came in when they were given colors that we don't normally use like neon colors, pearlescent colors, and glitter colors. The finishing touch was adding small dots and dashes to the paintings when the entire paper was filled.

by Aurelia

This lesson taught us how variety (using as many colors and kinds of circles as possible), pattern (creating circles within circles), along with balance and space(filling up our paper). We also discussed mood, and felt that most of the paintings were happy and energetic. You can tie the lesson into math if you try to count and sort the amount of circles on each painting.

by Daniel

Try and make your own piece of art creating a mood by just using circles!

Color Mixing

First graders at Cumberland have been very busy learning and experimenting with colors. For the last 3 weeks they have been mixing Primary colors together to create new secondary colors, just like we read in the book Mouse Paint by Ellen Stoll Walsh. You can watch a video that tells the story here.

Mouse paint video.

The first week we mixed the 2 primaries together of yellow and red. We painted orange circles.

The second week we mixed the 2 primaries together of yellow and blue. We painted green squares.

This past week we mixed the 2 primaries together of red and blue. We painted purple triangles. There are so many kinds of purples to make as you can see in the photos. Some are more red, and some are more blue.

Later in the year we will use these painted papers to make other art projects!