Mixing Colors to Form New Ones in Kindergarten: A Fun Color Experiment

Mixing Colors in Kindergarten: Fun with Fingerpaint

written by: Alicia • edited by: Laurie Patsalides • updated: 1/20/2012

Have students learn about colors and perform an experiment to see first hand how colors blend to make new colors.

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You will need the following items to complete your science project on colors:
1. Medicine dropper
2. Yellow paint
3. Red paint
4. Paintbrush
5. Paper plate for each student
6. Newspaper
7. 3 coffee filters
8. Black marker
9. Sink
10. Notebook
11. Pencil
Follow the instructions below to learn about colors:
1. Lay newspaper across your student's desks to protect the desks from paint.
2. Give each student a paper plate.
3. Add a dab of yellow paint to the paper plate and then a dab of red. Tell the students to leave the paint until you have given everyone a dab of each color.
4. Ask the students if they think two colors can join together to make one color. Have them write their guess in a notebook that is labeled "What I learn about colors".
5. Have the students mix the yellow and red paint together and then ask them what color they see. They should say orange. Have them write what happened in their notebooks. If they don't know how to spell yet, have them draw what happened with crayons. It is important that they begin to learn how to keep records and how to document for science experiments. Optional: do again with yellow and blue.
6. Explain to the students that they just saw how to take two colors to make one. Now you are going to show them one color and have them find out what colors were put together to make that color.
7. Get three student volunteers. Have them color a big black spot in the middle of a coffee filter. Have them stand over a sink and have another student put droplets of water onto the black spot.
8. Wait one minute and then remove the coffee filter from the sink. Repeat with the other two filters to be sure to get an accurate result. Ask students what colors they see on the coffee filters. Have the students document what happened. If they can't spell, then they can depict what happened with their crayons.
A fun activity to do with the students is to tell them that they will finger paint a pumpkin with a green stem. Ask them the color of the pumpkin. Pretend you are all out of orange and green paint. Tell them that they will have to use yellow and red to finger paint the pumpkin. Much to their delight they will find that they made orange. Repeat with green.
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by Jay Simmons