Little Blue and Little Yellow Colour Exploration

This months Virtual Book club for kids author is Leo Lionni and we’ve chosen 2 books first I’m sharing our exploration of colour with the book Little Blue and Little Yellow.

I have never read any Leo Lionni books and as colours is something that I am working with T on I thought it sounded a great book to read with them both. In the end J got the most out of it. The story is about Little Blue and Little Yellow and the fun that they have being friends – but underlying it is some colour mixing theory – Blue and Yellow = Green.

So as it’s not something that we have done before I took the opportunity to do a colour wheel with J using some ready mixed paints. T joined in as well creating her own wheel but here’s was more focused on getting the colours in the segments and less on the mixing of the paints to combine and make new colours.

Using a plate I drew around it to form a circle and then divided it up into 6 segments. Within 3 of the segments I wrote the words of the primary colours – Red, Blue and Yellow (as they have different letters to start with J who doesn’t read yet but does recognise the letters that words start with was able to identify which colour to use for each segment).

When you set this up for your child remember that unless they are good about washing brushes between colours then provide 3 brushes for your child one for each colour – I try and get the washing brushes between colours but with this is was more important that the colours are made.

We’re using paper plates for art palettes at the moment which are very effective and provide lots of space for colour mixing although J chose to do the colour mixing on the paper. He splodged each of the colours in the empty segments and then mixed them together.

To form the secondary colours – Orange, Purple and Green (although our Green isn’t great – for some reason one of our blue’s isn’t very pure and when we make green it always ends up muddy looking!).

We’ve added it to our art wall now above the crafting table and for a while I will be only using primary colours in our painting and the colours that J wants to make he will have to mix himself but can refer back to the colour wheel to do so.

With T later I will be exploring colour names with Little Blue and Little Yellow and will share some further ideas for colour work with toddlers in the near future.