Shades of Green: Challenge Accepted!

    

         Confession: In my three year teaching career I have yet to tackle a field trip solely by myself.  A special thanks to the third grade team for setting up this trip, reaching out to collaborate, and allowing me to tag along on their fabulous day at the United States Botanical Garden. 

  A concept which I have found is a challenge for my students to grasp is the numerous shades of colors there are in the world around us.  For example, green!  We have been working on still life pieces and I found myself constantly pushing students to look at the colors they see and mix the appropriate shades.  A general tendency of most elementary school artists is to think "oh, that leaf is green, the flower stem is green, there is green on the bamboo" and then proceed to pick up a green crayon and color all those items the same shade of green.  Upon asking them to really look and describe the greens they see, they continued to come to the same conclusion: "it's all green".  This is the point in which as a teacher, you have to go back, and figure out how to teach this concept in a different way.  So, over the weekend I went to Home Depot and raided the paint sample cards to collect the hundreds of shades of green.  After seeing and holding these different shades, and then verbally describing the different shades and how students would go about mixing them, I could see the wheels turning and students were starting to understand and use this new skill. Students were regularly showing mastery of this concept by creating artwork which included various shades of colors but for some reason, they didn't seem as excited and proud as I had imagined they would.

Then it hit me.  There was no real world experience or concrete connection about this concept for my students.  

One morning in the copy room, a third grade teacher informed me the grade level was going to the botanical garden downtown.  BINGO! Where better to have students experience and witness all these shades of green than the botanical garden?   

So, off we went one morning in March on a beautiful day.  Students rotated through the jungle room of the garden where they had the opportunity to do some observational drawings of the plants they saw.  I packed paper, oil pastels, crayons, and crayola color sticks in small bags for students to share.  This experience created the real world connection for these students to understand and see all these different shades in a new way. This experience was that last piece of the puzzle for students to truly master this concept.   In the art room at school now, students often ask for or offer assistance by saying "well, tell me first the color you see", "is it a dark green?  A blue-ish green? Lime green?".  Third grade conquered the challenge "shades of green". 

My reflection on this experience... maybe we need more field trips which include observational, on site, drawing?!