March 28th to 30th - colors - part 1

From this month on, I will not publish twice a week, but only on Mondays, because I think it was too demanding and also I wanna have some extra material for the the period when we have vacation.

You probably know that if we mix blue and red we will have purple and if we mix yellow and blue we will have green. But, in case we do this experiment with colored pencils will we have the same result? The activity I planned for this week for 1st and 2nd grade students was about it.

I always ask for two students to distribute the papers. In this case I had folded it, so the kids would see only the circle, the plus sign and the other circle, but not the circle and the equal sign (=). I thought I would have more control of the class like this, as many of them still do not read and commit some mistakes. Erasing colored pencils is not easy. I found that worked really well.

The criteria to choose the colors they would mix were: primary colors and colors with the spelling closer to Portuguese (at least the first letter), so I could, for example, make a G sound, pointing to the letter, before pronouncing "green".

Before starting, I asked everyone to fill the header. I kind of reproduced the header on the board, wrote "teacher, grade, student" in black on the positions of the paper and wrote my name and their grades in red. But at this age it is still difficult to understand that what is on the board is the same as what is on the paper, and they are being taught how to read. So many of them wrote "teacher" again (in this case, I did not correct them) or my name on the student position.

So, during the activity, I stopped using the board and decided to go one by one on their desks. At this age it is very common that they come to the teacher all the time to show their evolution on the activity or to ask if they are doing it right. 

On the first grade, many students put a color where they were not supposed to. Noticing that was not so clear for some of them, I asked everybody to do it in pairs, and adopted this practice for the next groups (four 2nd grades and three 1st grades total). In pairs was also easier for me, because with one explanation I could reach two students. I did not know exactly who could read or who could not, but, anyway, I used to point to the names of the colors, spelling them and pronouncing the color, compared to other circles where the same name was written.

The result of the sum of the colors were a little different to many of them, with different interpretations. For one pair, the result color did not seem like purple or green, so the student, Laura, answered "blue + red" and "blue + yellow" and so on. For another pair, they said that blue + red looked like black. For some, it still looked like only red or only blue. I considered all those answers right. So, I consider I was negotiating meaning with the kids. 

Some kind of already knew the answer and wanted to circle the result circle in purple or green, but I asked to really mix the colors, because I wanted them to really experiment mixing them. And for those who colored half of the circle blue and the other half red I asked to not separate the colors, but really mix them (I repeated the word "mix" many times).

Only a few students of the second grade finished the whole activity, so, for the next class, I will have to continue it.