Wednesday Works - Tints, shades, and tones with 3rd grade

 I can't take credit for this idea at all.  I just saw it on Pinterest, or on another Art Teacher blog but I go to so many that I have no clue where it came from originally. 

At any rate, I've given myself a goal this school year - add 5 brand new lessons to each grade level - to keep the curriculum fresh and interesting (and exciting!) 

This is the first new 3rd grade lesson.   I realized we didn't paint much in 3rd grade with all the other lessons and units I had in the pile so this was perfect.  

 Kids had a main color at their table and each had individual spoon fulls of white in their own cups.
The center circle was traced using a roll of masking tape.   That circle is painted first with white.   Then drop by drop, each concentric ring was painted until they covered the papers.

We talked about :
color + white = a tint
color + black = a shade   
color + black + white = a tone

some tables had straight color from the bottle, some had color + black (a shade) originally so the finals are either tints or tones.

Day 2 is for finishing.   I have always been of the opinion that holidays didn't need to be present in the art room   Plenty of my colleagues did arty, crafty holiday projects so I stuck with my art history and techniques faithfully for years.   

Since I'm trying to add some spark into the curriculum, I gave the students the option for a little spooky halloween kinds of fun for this, if they were so inclined.  

(meaning, we had lots of spiders and webs)

 Our moonscapes were mainly finished with some silhouettes of trees and branches, with the option of adding nocturnal animals to the scene as well.   Tied in perfectly to the lesson on owls and bats they just finished up in their regular classrooms.

 (this one had a minor paper fold-over while it was wet but we decided it looked a lot like cloud cover)