Color Theory Lessons and The Color Wheel

The past several weeks have been focused on color theory and all the colors in the color wheel.  The children were not allowed to use orange, green and purple colored pencils, or water colors, they needed to mix the colors themselves.  I would say that most of my kids would answer the question "If I run out of Red paint, what do I do?" properly.  Do you know it?  Well, you can't mix it, you must go to the store and buy it. 
 Although it was a hard task not to dip the paintbrush in orange and just get on with it, I feel like the kids really immersed themselves in color mixing.  On top of the primary, secondary and tertiary colors, I also had a heavy focus on tints and shades of each color.  Not sure you know 100% what that means?...ask your kid. :-)  
So I have this secret password thing to enter my art classroom.  The password is the same for all grades and changes each week.  I've been pretty tough on them, they had to remember (and try to pronounce correctly) the word monochromatic.  Ha Ha.  But even my 1st graders pulled it off.  And I would guess to say that MOST of them actually know what it means too!  We still have one more project where we will utilize a monochromatic scheme using our tints and shades, and make something wonderful.  But until then, please enjoy these colorful photos of the making of the color wheel with only THREE colors.  [Red, Yellow, Blue] AKA Primary Colors. Of course, they used white and black too, for making their tints and shades.

1st through 3rd Grade used Colored Pencils for their mixing.

They got to choose whether they did a tint or a shade for each color on the wheel in the smaller box below.

4th and 5th used Water Colors

These are my 1ST GRADERS!  Look at that saturation with the colors! 

 I told them I didn't want to see any white, just perfect!