Creating Color

Red, yellow, blue—mix these three primary colors in different combinations and you can create all the colors of the rainbow. It’s a simple lesson we all can remember learning at some point in our childhoods, but can you remember the joy of creating your own colors for the very first time? For the children of the Appie group, this joy has been happening almost every day! 

The children have been busy painting masterpieces all along the toddler breezeway art wall. “At first we started with basic colors, but as we started reading color and painting books together, the children began asking for specific colors that we don’t have,” shared Lead Teacher Taleen. “This opened up a lot of conversations of inviting the children to think about what colors they need to create purple, green, or orange.” The teachers have been encouraging the children to pump their own paints and help them distinguish the colors they want and which combination of paints they will need to mix. 

“Their favorite book right now is Mouse Paint, where three white mice dunk themselves in red, yellow, and blue paints and experiment with mixing colors by dancing in different puddles of paint,” shared Taleen, “So they have loved the sensory experience of covering their hands in paint, mixing the different colors, and stamping them on the paper to see what color they’ve made.” 

At the CEC, aside from black and white, the only paint colors routinely bought in bulk are red, yellow, and blue. This is because of the rich opportunities that exploring with those three colors presents. Mixing colors helps to develop critical thinking, promotes inquiry and investigation, expands vocabulary and advances the children’s cognitive growth in many ways. We can’t wait to see what other fun color mixtures their creative thinking will guide them too next.