Color Tints and Shades for Preschoolers

Last week, I introduced the concept of light and dark colors to Vito using water colored solution. It was so easy to prepare and Vito had so much fun mixing and pouring water!



For the first try, Vito choses an orange color for the mixture.  I placed a generous amount of food coloring in the jar, added water and made him mix the solution.  This was our “darkest” shade. 


From the dark mixture, we distributed drops of colors to other bottles in different amounts using a pipette.  Like for our “lightest” mixture we put one drop of colored water, then next is 2-3 drops on the next bottle and increasing it as we go darker.  If your preschooler knows how to use the pipette and can count, I suggest that you let them do this activity but with supervision.

 

Once all the bottles have colored water in it, I made Vito add water to the bottles!  So those with greater amount of colored water has darker shades and those with less have a lighter shades. You can adjust the shading if the color difference are not explicit.



I lined up the bottles and discussed how the color varies, that the color gets lighter or darker, which one is dark or light etc.



And these are the other color tints/shades we’ve come up:

       

It’s pretty normal that they can’t understand the concept yet.  You can keep on revisiting this activity every now and then and they will eventually grasp the concept due to constant exposure.  Currently, Vito just knows the word dark and light but I don’t think he understands what it means. 

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