My Many Coloured Days~Emotions and Colour -Prep lesson

Lesson for Prep /Foundation class.

I used a number of picture story books, like ‘My Many Coloured Days’ by Dr Seuss and the Inside Out movie characters to discuss how feelings and emotions can be expressed with colours. We looked at the colour wheel to choose colours that best go with some common emotions: for example: happy (yellow), sad (blue), angry (red), frightened (orange), embarrassed (purple) and relaxed (green).

I drew some examples of faces with various emotions on the board. I got the children to draw a face showing a feeling next to each colour on the colour wheel in their books.

Children then choose 4 feelings to show on 4 faces. They traced a face template and drew their four chosen emotions in black waterproof marker (Prockey), using examples to help. Then they used food dye wash to paint each face the colour matching the emotions.

We discussed how we can feel all sorts of emotions even in one day. I had drawn an outline of a body on large sheets of paper and they used different colour pastels to trace over the border . They then use water colour paints to paint patches of colours on the inside of the body shape to represent our varying emotions.

The faces were then cut out and glued around the body shape. The faces could be smaller than what we did (as I had the brainwave to combine the two activities. You could of course display them as separate artworks!) Here are a couple put together:

Students share their pictures, describing the emotions shown and colours chosen, maybe relating a time they felt that particular emotion.