I picked up a bunch of paint chips a while ago  in my local Loews and spent a long time thinking about what I could have the children DO with them.  Just today I saw this post on Living Montessori who gives the children these chips as cutting exercises. Just cut along the line. That is so cool for little kids. Its so defined.

I’m not sure if this is where I got the idea for the following activity but, this huge color wheel with collaged objects was on Pinterest, from GettingmessywithmsJesssy.com and may have just been in my head all along.

It was obvious that I didn’t remember exactly how they did it which is why I just did it my own way.

I cut up all the paint chips into small pieces.

I then had the children take out their color wheels that they had done a few weeks before. (in my first class with them). We were going to continue on the color theme. The week before we had done the making shades and tints and I was trying to extend the ideas a bit.

I also brought in a number of magazines and ripped out the pages for them to find different shades and colors.

The basic idea was for them to find all the shades and tints of those colors and paste them on top of the colors in their wheels, filling up the whole paper. They had to pick out the different shades and colors from the magazines, rip them up and paste them near the colors they match or were most like. They were able to use the magazines and the paint chips.

As I have started learning, not all activities turn out exactly the way you think they would.

Some kids just put a few pieces of the papers on and some hadn’t even filled in all of their spaces.

The difference between the image above and the one below are glaring but, I have noticed that it goes like across the board.

What we ended up doing with the finished color wheels you see below, is stapling their shades and tints pictures to the backs of these, so that they have the same basic 3 activities that they did on color in one place. I tried getting the administration to laminate them, but they were too bulky and wouldn’t go through the machine.

I haven’t done much color work with the children since I did these activities. I wonder how much they remember.

But, at least I found something to do with the paint chips. 🙂