Third grade began a color study this year, we learned about secondary colors, intermediate colors, and most recently, tint and shade. In my experience teaching tint and shade are complicated. I like to relate the words tint and shade to something kids understand; shade is like shadow or a shade tree, a shadow is mostly black so shade = color + black. Tint is color + white, so I tell them to think of it like the opposite of shade, one student also suggested we need tinted sunglasses when its bright outside, I thought that was a neat analogy and used that with some of my classes.
3rd graders put a color in the middle and worked towards the outside of the paper by adding white to one side and black to the other, the closer they got to the sides, the lighter or darker it got. We completed them like zebra stripes to make room for two colors.
The blue and purple color made for a good sky. We discussed silhouettes and how they look like shadows on a lighter background. Students drew and traced their silhouette, making it easier to paint on the cool colored paper.
Students knew they didnt have to get the paint to the corner of the paper since we would be cropping (cutting a boarder) and matting on construction paper.
Students painted the silhouette and filled in some of the white space with additional blue paint.
Cropped the paper and pasted it to a black construction sheet for matting and display.
Now here is the hard part, students had to write about their work! I wrote a few vocabulary words on the board and the students had three or more sentences to describe their work. It was very powerful to read the descriptions, its tough to talk about your own work sometimes and writing artist statements is a good starting point.