Two Primary Colors = A Secondary Colored Scale Fish

FISH... I love fish for color mixing purposes. You have so many opportunities to teach color with all the different sections of fish. We started out The lesson with reading the story "Rainbow Fish." The story is a favorite of mine not matter if they read it before or not. The idea of sharing is something we can all be reminded of. After the story we traced a large oval. The oval gives the student a great starting paint to help keep their fish in scale. After the oval, we talk about the parts of a fish and draw the fins, tail, and lips (trace their fingers) together. We add the face line and eye, and start to talk about scales. I have some small plastic cups  that I give each student to help make the scales. The students trace half the cup in a row fashion creating the scales. When they finished a row, they started the next row in between two scales.

The next class, we talked about the primary colors and secondary colors. The students had to pick one primary color to paint the face. After the face, the students picked a second primary color to paint the fins and tail. After they finished painting the two primary colors, they mixed the two colors together (a small about of the darker color into the lighter colored primary color) to form a secondary color. The students painted the scales with the secondary color they mixed up. For students that can be pushed, have them play with different shades of that secondary color, making each scale a different color like the fish above. If I had more time in the school year I would have added seaweed.