Fun with Green

It is so much fun in the Springtime to do paintings of green.

I love painting rosy-pink in late winter, as the trees and bushes get their new growth. Then I love mixing colors and painting brown when Mud Season comes! And, finally, we get new green shoots coming up through the earth.

A lot of children haven't actually tried mixing paints before. They know that blue + yellow makes green because they've been told that it does. They know that blue + red makes purple, and red + yellow makes orange, and combining all three makes brown... but they don't really KNOW it because they haven't experienced it. Let me tell you, getting brown is not as easy as it sounds. But it's awfully fun to try!

Fun stories to go with MUD are Mud by Mary Lynn Ray as well as the "The Muddy Farmyard" story (pages 126-127) and "Pull on My Rain Boots" movement verse (page 88) of The Breathing Circle: Learning Through the Movememnt of the Natural Breath by Nell Smyth.

When it comes to green, I love the poem "A Spike of Green" by Barbara Baker. It is fun to take a Nature walk and try to find a brand new baby plant that you are the FIRST person in the world to ever see! If you are painting green with the Stockmar paints, you want lemon yellow and Prussian blue. Prussian blue is the cool blue -- meaning it is closer to yellow -- and it makes the best green. Ultramarine blue is the warm blue -- meaning it is closer to red -- and it makes the best purple.

A classic Waldorf watercolor painting sequence is the story of Little Yellow and Little Blue. Little Blue is shy and stands in the corner of the playground. Little Yellow, meanwhile, is cheerfully dancing and prancing around in the middle of the playground. You can paint it where Little Blue just stays in the corner. You can paint it where Little Blue goes around and around Little Yellow, because he's curious, but he can't bring himself to play (leave a careful line of white between them).

You can paint it where they DO finally touch (and you can also show how Little Red would come into a painting like this which is dashing RIGHT IN to the middle). But I felt like bringing a new imagination to my color mixing of green, so I came up with something about frogs. We painted something similar to the painting above, but with the blue first. We painted a blue pond and left a space in the middle for the mama frog to lay her eggs.

We brought the eggs in in yellow (yellow is the sanguine color and baby tadpoles are definitely very wiggly). When the eggs hatched and the tadpoles began to wiggle all about we let the yellow reach out into the blue. And we got froggy green!

To introduce this painting, I used a verse from The Singing Year by Candy Verney. I modified it slightly to have the eggs be "wee" instead of "black," since we were painting them in yellow.

Dot to Frog
page 24
CD track 23

Wriggledy wriggledy
Wriggle a lot:
Stuck in the jelly,
Little wee dot.

Waggledy waggledy
Waggle and roll:
Swim in the water,
Little tadpole.

Jumpitty jumpitty
Jumpitty jog:
Jump in the meadow,
Little green frog.

I introduced this as a movement verse, and told them that it was about a surprise animal and they had to listen to the clues. Stand up and interlock your fingers. Keep them interlocked but wiggle them for the eggs verse. Open your hands and swim them through the water for the tadpole verse. Hop about the room for the frog verse. I didn't say FROG... I said nothing after "green" and let them yell out FROG!

It is nice to do this verse twice before you paint and I said it once more quietly as they were painting when they were about to let the colors touch.

If you have favorite stories about frogs that would go well with this painting, please feel free to share!

After this, I like to give children both blues and both yellows and ask them, does every combination of blue and yellow make the same green? It is fun to explore that. Mixing greens is also a time when I really like acrylic paints, because they create new colors very smoothly. It is fun to paint a swatch of a green you have invented and then take it outside to see if you can find that EXACT SAME color in Nature! Or take a paint chip with you (any color) on a Nature walk and see if you can find it! Here are some photos from Feb 2020.

a "Spring" activity

Finding Nature's Greens

mixing a particular green,

then taking it outside to see if you can find it in Nature

once you find it, come back and write down

where in the yard you saw that exact color

this is not nearly as easy as it sounds

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