Color Wheel Birds

 

The past few weeks, the 2nd through 5th grades have been working on these wonderful color wheel bird collages. This lesson was inspired by the color wheel lessons on Deep Space Sparkle, but I chose birds as a subject because of the migration taking place this time of year and because of their interesting shapes, colors (primary AND secondary), and patterns. 

After a lesson on primary and secondary colors and the color wheel, students painted those color groups on strips of paper for their first step. The next visit to the art room, we observed birds in various poses--flying, walking, resting, swimming-- and then choose a pose for our own individual bird. We looked carefully at a bird's body and identified shapes of the bird's body parts. We created a diagram on the board to help us plan our collage. The students "drew with scissors" to create the shapes and then assembled them on self-selected colorful paper.

Finally, the students cut small segments of paper to create a frame on the perimeter of our paper (good math connection and vocabulary) and added some additional details with permanent marker and primary colored oil pastels on the birds (a good review of the color mixing lesson we started with). I love how unique each of these little birds turned out to be and what an effective lesson on color this was.