classic color wheels

Nothing ground breaking here, just some classic color wheels, but one of those skills I feel all middle school students need to master. 6th graders went through a series of practice exercises before making their final color wheel. First we use crayons and as a group color a color wheel while talking about the primary, secondary and intermediate colors. (Keep in mind some of my 6th graders have never had art). The next class I have table groups work together to paint a rather large group color wheel. They are given the primary colors and have to mix their secondaries and intermediate colors and get them in the correct place on the color wheel.

 After this group challenge I provided some troubleshooting instruction on how to correctly mix colors (what colors are the strongest...moving light to dark and so on) Next class each student has to paint a practice color wheel (takes about 20 min) and then starts creating their final color wheel.

 I pre-print wedges that equal 1/12 of a circle. I ask the kids to manipulate the top arch of the wedge to create a simple shape that will radiate around the circle. Some kids went a little fancier and others stayed pretty plain.

After cutting out the wedge each student traces it 12 times on a large sheet of white paper and then paint their color wheel. When the kids are done painting they need to use sharpie to go over their pencil lines, cut out their color wheel and then glue it to black paper.

 Students are graded on clean brushwork, solid colors and that each student has correctly created their 12 colors.

I don't know if it my camera or editing or computer screen but I feel like the colors the kids made are showing up distorted on the computer screen... particularly in the orange family.

One helpful hint we have learned is to use more of teal blue than a standard blue to get better color mixing. We also add a tinny dot of white to our purple colors to make them easier to see.