Colorful and Musical Feelings

Summary

Art and music activities help students express and understand their feelings.

Materials

Color Explorations

• Mouse Paint
• Cookies
• Frosting
• Food coloring
• Plate or napkins
• Paint
• Crayons
• Paper
• Mouse
• Chart (class graph)
• Mouse Graph
• Ink pad
• Greeting cards
• Blank white cardstock
• Color Wheel

Moody Music

• Vivaldi's "Four Seasons"
• Paper
• Crayons
• Pencils
• Index cards
• Class graph8

Additional Resources

Books

Mouse Paint, by Ellen Stohl Walsh; ISBN 0152002650

Hailstones and Halibut Bones, by Mary O'Neill; ISBN 0385410786

Background for Teachers

Mouse Paint by Ellen Stohl Walsh is a book about mixing the primary colors to make secondary colors. Your students should be very familiar with the primary colors and have had opportunities to use a variety of colors in works of art. As a teacher, you need to be familiar with a variety of works of art, how the colors were used, and what emotions the artist invokes by using those colors.

Students need to be exposed to a variety of music genres. Many classical pieces have been composed to portray a certain message and Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" is a good example of this. His music depicts the four seasons, Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall. Before teaching this lesson, teachers should be familiar with Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" and be able to point out the parts of the music that match each season. Teachers should also have available other music pieces they can teach their classes to sing or just listen to.

Intended Learning Outcomes

1. Communicate clearly in oral, artistic, written, and nonverbal form.

Instructional Procedures

Invitation to Learn

Read the story Mouse Paint by Ellen Stohl Walsh. As you read the story, have students mix the primary colors to discover what color they will make, previous to reading the page in the book. For example, as the red mouse plays in the yellow puddle, stop and have students mix those two colors and see what they discover. After they mix the colors, continue on reading the story. To mix the colors, you could have them use paint, crayons, clay or even frosting on cookies. If you choose to use the frosting and cookies (vanilla wafer style), the students start with three tubs of white frosting at their tables. When they meet the three mice in the story, you go and put food coloring in the frosting to make it red, yellow, and blue. They then frost three cookies, one red, one yellow, and one blue. As you get to the parts where the mice mix the colors, add new food coloring to the frosting and have the students mix it and see what color it becomes. They then frost three more cookies, and by the end of the story they have six cookies one red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple.

Instructional Procedures

Color Explorations

1. Discuss with your class what happened in the story and what colors were mixed to make new colors. Display on the board all the colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple. They can be displayed using squares of paper with the color words written on them.
2. Using the Mouse worksheet that has been copied in the six colors (red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple), have students pick their favorite color of mouse and cut it out. Have students graph their mouse on a big class graph made of butcher paper or a pocket chart. The graph should be labeled with the colors on the bottom so students know where to place their mice. Once everyone is done, look at it as a class and discuss what they notice or what information they can gather, such as which color has the most, which color has the least, etc.
3. Students will make their own representation of the graph from the class graph. Using the Mouse Graph worksheet, have your students mark the boxes for each color. Students could make mouse thumbprints by making a thumb print and then decorate it like a mouse. Once they are done, have them compare it to the class graph to see if it is the same.
4. Discuss with the class how different colors can make us feel different ways. Show your students some greeting cards and talk about what colors were used to decorate the card and what message the artist is trying to portray. Play a game using the cards where you show the front of the card and have the students guess what the message is on the inside.
5. Give students blank cards, have them decorate them and write their message on the inside. They can then share them with their neighbors and see if they can guess what message is inside.

Moody Music

1. Discuss with your class how music is composed to portray a certain message and makes us feel certain moods or feelings.
2. Introduce your students to Vivaldi's "Four Seasons." Discuss how the music was written to make listeners feel and imagine what each season is like.
3. Play one of the seasons and have students draw pictures of that season. Remind them to think of what activities they participate in during the seasons.
4. On the back of their paper, have students write about their season and then share it with others.
5. Repeat this activity with all the seasons, creating a season book. Each child will have created four pages and it is then put into a book. They will each have their own book that they can share with others.
6. Students can pick their favorite season. Give them each a 3x5 card and have them draw their favorite thing that reminds them of the season and then place it on a graph that the whole class can see. The graph can be made out of butcher paper or a pocket chart that is labeled with all the seasons at the bottom. As a class, compare and contrast it.

Extensions

Curriculum Extensions/Adaptations/ Integration

• Using a variety of poetry styles, students can create a poetry book about all the colors. They can write acrostics, haikus, lists, etc. Read the book, Hailstones and Halibut Bones to them to show an example of color poems.
• Using a variety of poetry, have students write poems about the four seasons.
• Pick a famous work of art. Share it with the class and have them notice the colors that were used. Talk about the mood that is created through the colors. Have the students create their own work of art trying to portray a mood through the colors.
• Give each group of 5-6 students a large container of crayons. Have them sort them into the different shades of colors (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple). As a group they will have to discuss which color they think each crayon fits into. When they are done, have them walk around and see how the others tables sorted theirs. Discuss it as a class and why you would use different shades of a color.
• Discuss dynamics of music (loud, soft, etc.) Teach your class the different symbols that are used in music so that those playing the music will know what to play. Have students share what mood or feeling would go with each dynamic.
• Listen to and/or sing a song that has similes about feelings in the lyrics. Introduce your students to writing similes. Have them write about a feeling using similes. Have them include things like colors, times they feel that way, and levels of noise. For example:

  Happy is yellow
  Happy is playing in the snow
  Happy is medium loud

Family Connections

• Assign students to make a color collage at home. Have them pick their favorite color and then find pictures in magazines or draw things that are that color. Have them bring them to class and share them.
• Have students ask their family members what their favorite color is and make a graph using the Mouse Graph worksheet.
• Teach students songs at school, send the words home with them and have them share the songs with their family.
• Ask students to ask their family what season is their favorite, have them make a graph and bring it back to school to share.

Assessment Plan

• Give students the Color Wheel worksheet. Have them color in the wheel. Guide them on coloring in the red, yellow, and blue space, and then let them do the rest on their own. Observe to see if they recognize which colors mixed together to make the new colors.
• Play one of Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" and have the students identify which season it is.
• Create a graph of the class' favorite colors, using the data that you collected from graphing their colored mice in the Mouse Paint lesson. Have them read the graph and answer questions such as: which color has the most, which color has the least, etc.

Bibliography

Research Basis

Berkeley, S.L., Mastropieri, M.A., & Scruggs, T.E. (2007). Peers helping peers. Educational Leadership. 64(5) 54-58.

In this article, the authors discuss the benefits of teachers using cooperative learning in their classroom. We all have students in our class that come from a variety of academic levels. By using cooperative learning, we can model the strengths of students to others in the classroom. As they work together, they learn from each other and also learn to work together.

Kendall, J.S., DeFrees, K., Pierce, J., Richardson, A., & Williams, J. (2002). Connecting ideas: a strategy for extending the curriculum. ERIC Source. Retrieved January 20, 2008, from http://www.eric.ed.gov.

This article talks about the importance of using connections when teaching students. They talk about how there is not enough time to teach them everything new, so we must find what they already know and build from there. We have to take what is essential to be taught and connect it with something else, so that we can fit it all in.