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This project is one I keep coming back to year after year. It is so much fun for the kids, yet it has them practicing so many skills! I like to time this project with kindergarten's study of patterns, which they just finished up last week. We talk about the rainbow as a type of pattern- the colors repeat in the same order every time. Students begin their paintings with a squiggle line going all the way across their papers. Next, they'll make a matching squiggle line using the next color in the spectrum. These lines will repeat until the entire paper is filled with rainbow squiggles! The main learning objective of this project is for students to learn the correct order of the colors in the rainbow. I introduce the concept of the color wheel, and explain that it's like a round rainbow. This understanding will be important as students are later introduced to the science of color and how primary and secondary colors work. In making these paintings, students are also learning how to successfully handle a paintbrush. Their goal is to place lines of color next to one another- very close, but not touching! Painting with that amount of control takes a lot of small-muscle movements in the hand, and is a great exercise for developing fine motor skills. Students also learned important painting routines, like remembering to wash their brush before switching colors and treating the brush gently instead of scrubbing it across the paper! It was so interesting to see some students begin their paintings with a color other than red. Though red is typically the color you start with when naming the colors in order, I explain to the students that when looking at the colors in color-wheel form, it's a never-ending repeating pattern. Once you get to the last color, you are right back where you started and can just keep going! This means that no matter what color you start with, the colors before and after will always be the same. Seeing students take these different approaches is evidence that they are truly understanding the learning, instead of just copying from an example!
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