Colorful Spring Garden

This lesson was inspired by Andy Warhol’s brightly colored garden prints

The main objective of this lesson was color theory. We looked at PRIMARY COLORS and how they mix to create SECONDARY COLORS. The secondary objective was exploring different TEXTURES and how they look and feel. We also looked at different parts of the flowers and recognized the leaves, the petals, and the middles where the “seeds” are.

We mixed blue and yellow paint to create the green for our backgrounds. This was the grass for our gardens. While our “grass” was drying, we used color diffusing paper flowers and liquid watercolor to experiment with mixing primary colors. (Coffee filters and markers could also be used for this step).

We discovered that BLUE + YELLOW = GREEN, RED + YELLOW = ORANGE, and RED + BLUE = PURPLE.

To make additional flowers for our mixed media collage, we used some colored cupcake liners that have a fun texture around the edges. The ridges felt “Bumpy” under our fingertips. We also explored lots of different textures for our flower middles. We used sensory collage materials that included foam bits, tissue, noodles, shredded paper, balls, and cardboard; all in a variety of bright colors.

Finally, we created leaves for our flowers. The leaves were pre-cut green construction paper and the students used green markers to practice drawing the lines that they saw on the leaves. Different kinds of leaves can be brought in as examples for this lesson. I used whatever I could pick outside the school! ;)

Students made choices about what colors they wanted as well as the placement of their flowers. This lesson was for Special Needs Pre-K and took 2 30 minute class sessions. Here are some final projects:[if gte vml 1]><v:shapetype id="_x0000_t75" coordsize="21600,21600" o:spt="75" o:preferrelative="t" path="m@4@5l@4@11@9@11@9@5xe" filled="f" stroked="f"> <v:stroke joinstyle="miter"></v:stroke> <v:formulas> <v:f eqn="if lineDrawn pixelLineWidth 0"></v:f> <v:f eqn="sum @0 1 0"></v:f> <v:f eqn="sum 0 0 @1"></v:f> <v:f eqn="prod @2 1 2"></v:f> <v:f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelWidth"></v:f> <v:f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelHeight"></v:f> <v:f eqn="sum @0 0 1"></v:f> <v:f eqn="prod @6 1 2"></v:f> <v:f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelWidth"></v:f> <v:f eqn="sum @8 21600 0"></v:f> <v:f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelHeight"></v:f> <v:f eqn="sum @10 21600 0"></v:f> </v:formulas> <v:path o:extrusionok="f" gradientshapeok="t" o:connecttype="rect"></v:path> <o:lock v:ext="edit" aspectratio="t"></o:lock> </v:shapetype><v:shape id="_x0000_i1025" type="#_x0000_t75" style='width:174pt; height:231.75pt;visibility:visible'> <v:imagedata src="file:///C:/Users/Robert/AppData/Local/Temp/msohtmlclip1/01/clip_image001.jpg" o:href="cid:11780124-1b67-477f-a43c-37a520e04699@namprd07.prod.outlook.com"></v:imagedata> </v:shape><![endif][if !vml][endif]