Little Explorers: Color Mixing w/paint

Like I said, I love to mix colors with preschoolers.  It is so simple, but they love it so much.


Coloring Mixing

Here's what you need:

• 3 clear zipper bags
• red, yellow and blue washable tempera paint

Ask your child to pick two colors.  Put a generous squirt of each into a zipper bag.  Zip up the bag tight, hand it over to your little scientist and encourage them to squeeze, squish, and mix the paint.  Repeat until you've mixed all three combinations:

 red + yellow = orange

yellow + blue = green

blue + red = purple

What is happening:

This is the color wheel in its funnest form!  When you take the primary colors (red, yellow, and blue) and mix them together you get secondary colors (orange, green and purple).  

Extreme experimentation:

If you are not mess averse you can just squirt the paint onto white paper and have the kids mix it with their fingers.  Make sure you wash their hands in between each combo to avoid contamination of colors and creating brown.

For some fun tactile writing practice tape a baggy onto a white piece of paper and have your child work on writing letters or drawing pictures in the paint.  Both of my kids did this a lot longer than I expected.  

Then, of course, the kids will want to actually paint.  It is paint, after all!

Isabella wanted to make a cake and pretended she was piping frosting on (I cut a small corner off).