Trophy Fish Color Craft Lesson

Submitted by: Rebekah Poe of Covenant Christian School
Grade Level: 2nd - 4th grades (Ages 7 - 9)

Unit: Color Mixing

 

Goals/Objectives:

To teach the students about primary and secondary colors and the order they fall in in the rainbow.

 

Materials:

For Demonstration-

• Food coloring

• Six clear jars (baby food jars work great)

• Water

For Rainbow Trout:

• 8" (20.3 cm) cardboard circles (I bought the cardboard cake circles in the wedding section of Walmart) painted to look like wood (which I did the night before to save time)

• Drawing of an outline of a fish divided into six parts

• Crayons or Tempera Paint

• Scissors


• Glue Sticks

• One way to add humor to the lesson would be to show a singing Big Mouth Billy Bass so they not only learn what a mounted fish looks like, they get music and humor along with it. -Ken)

Lesson:

I began by teaching the students a song that I came up with to help them remember which colors are primary and which are secondary. The tune is "The Cheese Stands Alone" (Also known as The Farmer In The Dell).

 

Yellow, red, and blue
Yellow, red, and blue
Primary colors are
Yellow, red, and blue

Purple, orange, green
Purple, orange, green
Secondary colors are
Purple, orange, green

 

I did a demonstration of the colors using food coloring and water. I put a few drops of red, yellow, and blue into separate containers (baby food jars are great). I asked the students what color they thought we could make if we mixed red and blue/blue and yellow/yellow and red. I combined the food coloring to see what colors they made.

 

After the demonstration, I put the baby food jars of colored water into the order they appear on the rainbow.

I passed out the outline drawing of the fish, and the students colored each section in order of the rainbow. [NOTE: To promote creativity ,if time allows it would be better to encourage them to draw their own fish after viewing pictures of various fish- Ken]

 

They cut the fish out and glued them onto their piece of "wood." We hung the fish outside in the hall way for everyone to admire our "trophy fish."

 

The kids loved singing their new song for their classroom teachers!

 

Assessment:

The students learned which colors are primary and which are secondary. They learned what order the colors are in on the rainbow. The younger ones worked on coloring inside the lines and cutting on the lines.