Warm and Cool Colors with 2nd Grade

2nd grade recently learned about warm and cool colors. They used soft pastels to make these cool color birch trees. This is a lesson I got directly from my cooperating teacher while I was student teaching. It was a great lesson, so I'm reusing it now in my own classroom! The students used masking tape to make trees on their paper, and then they colored the sky, grass, and shadows with pastels. After taking the tape off, the students carefully added little black lines on their birch trees with a crayon. To ensure that the tape would come off easily, the students stuck it to their shirt before sticking it on the paper.

2nd  grade made desert pictures for warm colors. They painted a watercolor sky with any warm colors that they wanted, and glued sand on for the ground. I mixed together all the warm colors of sand that I had (pink, red, orange, yellow, tan) to make the sand color. The students learned that when you mix two (or more!) warm colors together, the result is still a warm color! The camels are drawn with colored pencil.

I like how these pictures look in the hallway. The warm and cool colors really complement each other!

Here is a close-up of the heading on the top of my bulletin board.