(Photograph) - Use the illustrations as you will, but remember the emphasis on language and vocabulary (names of colours and shades), commonly used names and made-up names. You could:
Display the Kandinsky painting on the wall.
Divide your class into groups - red, green, yellow, blue, purple, orange. Give each group glossy magazines. Search them for different hues and tones of their group’s colour and tear them out in pieces, then stick the pieces on white paper, grouped as pupils like (at random or similar shades together).
Tell each group to write descriptive names for each piece of colour - “washing up bowl yellow”, “sore thumb red”. Then go on to browns and greys.
Working in the same groups, get pupils to make their own colour-mix rainbows, using paint and rollers, on big pieces of white paper.
Let pupils experiment with rolling colours one on top of the other. Notice the effects of different kinds of mixing, and make rainbow shapes to reflect moods - happy, sad, lively, mad and so on.
Useful words: Hue - The redness, yellowness or blueness of a colour.
Saturation - the intensity or degree of strength and purity of a colour.
Tint - A pale colour, a colour with the addition of white.
Tone - the lightness or darkness of a colour.
Useful books:
Oxford Primary Art, Key Stage 1 Modern Art (Pounds 2.50, OUP, Tel: 01865 556767).
Teaching Young Children to DrawG. Cooke and D. Griffin (Pounds 11.95, Falmer Press, Tel: 0171-583 0490).
