Storytime: Mice, Color Mixing & Strawberries

This month we added a story time session at our library and featured mice!

We read the amazing hide and seek book "A Mouse in the House" by Henrietta, "The Little Mouse, The Red Ripe Strawberry, and THE BIG HUNGRY BEAR" by Dan & Audrey Wood and "Mouse Paint" by Ellen Stoll Walsh. We didn't get to "EEK! There's a Mouse in the House" by Wong Herbert Yee- but wanted to share it since it goes with the theme and is quite entertaining. We did however have red ripe strawberries and cheese with our lunch ;)

We used a color mixing activity we found on the The Colors of My Day children's art blog to create paintings reminiscent of Piet Mondrian.

First we created some grids by cutting some lengths of black washi tape. Electrical tape or mini black Duck tape would also work. This is a great time to talk about squares and rectangles and count their sides.
The main focus of this activity is mixing colors. Providing our willing preschooler with a cup of yellow and blue liquid water color we showed her how to mix the colors in one of the boxes.

Slowly as her paint progressed, we then swapped the blue and yellow for a fresh yellow and a red as well as a clean/rinsed paint brush.

The last paint swap we made was of course a fresh red and a blue and a clean paintbrush.

Although we had planned this activity for a potentially larger group of around 10-15 children, for this age it is best to work more closely with one or two children. In the art blog, The Colors of My Day the teacher was working with Kindergartners, so a larger group of older children would work well too.

After this painting, we gave our artist more license and as we know...if you mix all 3 primary colors you get brown. But how she found her way to brown was certainly more interesting than the end product- when at one point in time she had mixed a color almost like her own hair color.

Given even more license with the materials, the art session turned into water play- tranferring the liquids from tiny cup to tiny cup, then to a larger water mixing cup and eventually a bowl- loose parts at their best!

We also tried this project with a palette of paint rather than mixing primary color paints.

To change the look of the piece or to experiment with positive and negative space, remove the tape.....

Give this project a try and enjoy the process :)