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).

Little Explorers: Color Mixing w/eye dropper

One of my favorite experiments to do with preschool kids is to mix colors.  

Coloring Mixing 

Here's what you need:

• 3 cups
• water
• red, yellow and blue food coloring
• eye/medicine dropper
• clear plastic egg carton

Fill the 3 cups with water and put a about 5 drops of red food coloring in 1 cup, yellow in a different cup and blue in the last cup.  Put the egg carton on top of the white paper so you can easily see the color changes.  Demonstrate how to use the eye dropper (if your child doesn't know how to already).  Have your child drop some yellow into one of the egg cups and then add red.  Ta-da!  It turned orange!  Awesome.  

Repeat again and again to see how many different colors and shades of colors your child can come up with.  Allow your child to explore on their own.  It's okay if they all turn brown or black, that's part of the fun and learning.  (I had to keep telling myself this while Isabella was doing this!)

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).  Also, kids are really strengthening their dexterity by using the eye dropper.  

Extreme experimentation:

Try experimenting with a little bit of one color and a lot of another color.  For example, encourage your child to put in a lot of yellow, but just a tiny bit of blue.  What happens?!

Isabella decided to spred some of her colors on the white paper so she could see the differences better.  In the cups they all looked brown to her.