"We Made the Rainbow!"

 We left off on Thursday with some questions about mixing colors to create new ones. As O found out, when she blended two colors it became a new one. Amazing! Today, we thought we could revisit this idea and test it out with some playdoh. I'll be honest, this was a huge experiment. Homemade playdoh can be a little tricky (and quite sticky!) so we weren't entirely sure if mixing the two colors would actually work. 

First and foremost, we needed to make playdoh! J, L, and F were great helpers. 

We used a pretty simple recipe of flour, salt, oil, cream of tartar, and water. A recipe for the stickiest playdoh this side of the Mississippi. 

"It's so sticky!"
"I don't like it."

"It looks like dough!"
"Pizza!"

"Can we make it red?"
"No, pink!!"

"I want yellow."

"We need green!"

Phew, they were rattling off a list of things they thought we needed to do with the playdoh. We took a brief break to chat about what colors we would start with. Luckily for us, we only really had the food coloring in primary colors. This would only lend to our experiment of creating secondary colors. 

"But, I want green!"
"We don't have green."

How were we going to make green? This activity is a bit of an extension from a study the Pine PM kids did last year revolving around colors (Color Blog). In hopes to continue a similar study, we held onto the color wheel last years class made in hopes to use as a reference or aid in any future studies. Today was the day! 

We pulled out the color wheel. 

"I want to make orange!" L said. He looked at the chart and thought for a minute. "How do we make orange? Oh, I know, we can use red!" 

He continued to look at the color wheel, but was having a hard time coming up with the second color he would need. 

After some discussion it was determined that it was red and yellow that were needed to make orange. 

We continued around the table until each child picked a different color to recreate. Then, it was on- time to mix up the playdoh. 

Outside, we continued our exploration of colors through the use of paint! 

These were two really fun and engaging activities. They provided concrete ways to see how colors can change by mixing two of them. A great way to start this study!