Light and Color Fun

A homemade pinhole camera allowed us to see images. Can you see the upside down image of Mahayla on the camera's paper? Since light rays travel in a straight line, they flow into the pinhole of the box so that the rays cross one another and invert the image.

A homemade kaleidoscope allowed us to see the effects of reflection.

We used several curved materials to split white light into the color spectrum.

Using a compass and protractor to create circles for color wheels turned into a great math lesson!

Color wheels were mounted on pencils and spun to see what happens when colors are mixed. We made a black and white wheel, too, that turned gray.

We used primary colors to create secondary colors and painted with our new colors.

We each chose one primary color and created new hues by tinting and shading our color. A color is tinted when white is added to it and shaded when black is added to it. Once we had a nice color palette, we made monochromatic paintings.

A chromatography experiment helped us separate colors from markers.

Our study of Seurat this month fit in perfectly as we discussed how images are made up of pixels. A pointillism project inspired by Seurat helped drive the idea of pixels home.

In a discussion about convex lenses making things look bigger, we completed this very simple demonstration to show that anything curved and transluscent will magnify an image.

A homemade microscope helped us to see a slide more closely.

A real microscope with 10x and 43x magnifiers helped us see the slide much better! (Scour your local curriculum sales. I bought this microscope a couple years ago for TWO dollars!)