Prekindergarten Handpainting

For this activity, my prekinder students began learning about primary and secondary colors.

To begin the project we read the book Mouse Paint by Ellen Stoll Walsh. We talked about the 3 colors of paint that the mice jumped into (primary) and the 3 colors that they made when they danced in the paint (secondary).

Each student had a piece of watercolor paper and traced their hand at least 5 times (more if they could fit it). We talked about not letting the pencil touch their fingers so that they didn't get skinny fingers.

When it was time to paint, I had 1/2 of my tables set up with primary color tempera cakes and the other 1/2 set up with secondary tempera cakes. They chose a table to sit at and used the colors on that table to paint ONLY their hands.

For the next class, I put the tempera cakes out again, but this time I helped them look at the colors that they had already used. If they had already used red, blue and yellow, then they had to sit at a table with orange, green and violet and vice versa. For this part, they were painting the background of their paper. Pin It