When math overrides the majority of the time throughout the day, how do we incorporate the arts? We make art mathematical! Here is a fun activity to learn about the color wheel, as well as apply fraction skills in the process of creating the color wheel.
You’ll need a print out of a blank or semi-filled in color wheel, and modeling clay.
I used Crayola Model Magic clay for this activity. It’s soft, squishy, and will change colors when mixed! Normal clay can work just fine too. You can either let it dry and let them glue it to the page when it’s finished, or toss it back all together and store it in an airtight container for future use.
Start with three equal pieces of clay in red, yellow, and blue.
Leave a small reference piece behind, then with remaining clay, split into two equal pieces, creating two halves.
Mix the colors! Write out the fractions on the paper as well.
Orange= ½ R ½ Y
Purple= ½ B ½ R
Green ½ Y ½ B
For a shorter activity, find a smaller color wheel cut into sixths and stop here. For a longer activity, continue on. For the sake of a shorter blog post, I will only model one part of the next step.
On the blue and green side- split the blue and green pieces in ½. (For reference, I pulled a new piece of blue clay for this.)
Mix the blue and green pieces to make green-blue. Green-blue is equal to ½ G, ½ B. Or it is also equal to ¼ Y ¾ B.
The other half of the green that was split before will be used to mix with a half piece of the yellow.
Continue the same with yellow-green, red-orange, etc.
Common core standards:
CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.3.NF.A.3
CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.4.NF.A.2
featured image: hosmerart.blogspot.com