Sponsored by: National Grid
Written by: Dan Walsh,
STEM Educator
Supplies ideas:
Blue, white, yellow paint, brush, paper, colored pencils, scissors, 2 sheets of construction paper/ card stock, and newspaper for a table cloth. Optional: A small bowl with water
Length:
Paint time- 5 minutes
Academic Subjects:
Art/Science
Directions for Sky Painting:
1.) Draw a few clouds, the sun, and a rainbow on a sheet of paper. Color the sun and rainbow with crayons or colored pencils. A rainbow’s colors can be broken down by ROYGBIV, red, orange, green, blue, indigo, violet. Once they are colored in cut out the shapes.
2.) Optional: Prepare the small bowl with water.
3.) Place a sheet of newspaper down then place another white piece of paper down. Have a grown-up dab a few dots of blue and white paint randomly across the page.
4.) Now roll up those sleeves and get painting! When you mix the white and blue paint together, will the blue become lighter or darker? Have the student take the paintbrush and swirl the paint together in swoops until the entire page is covered. Make sure they are blending the paint as they go.
5.) Once the page is covered in paint, have the student lay the pre-cut sun, clouds, and rainbows down on the wet paint. Once the wet paint dries, the shapes should dry onto the paper! If not you can use a glue stick to glue the shapes down later.
For this project the shapes can be changed into anything! Other weather patterns can be added like lighting or snowflakes. Students can switch out the weather shapes for a pirate ship at sea or an underwater scene with fish. Did you know that a rainbow is reflected sunlight after a rainstorm? Sunlight may look yellow or white when we see it, but the rays are built up of red, orange, yellow, blue, indigo, and violet. During a rainstorm, the sun light shines through the raindrops, and the rain acts as a prism. The prism bends the sunlight and reflects back the colors of a rainbow.
Vocabulary:
Prism– A piece of glass or other see through material that has two identically shaped ends called faces. Light travels through one side of the glass and comes out as a rainbow on the other end!
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