Monday Mayhem: Edible Art Cookie Color Wheel

I LOVE COLOR. I also love(in moderation of course) COOKIES!!! So, lets combine these two lovely things and make it apply in the art room! I was taught this lesson in my college art education courses and because I'm in middle school with not as many students as elementary I decided it was time to try this lesson out!

First we talked about the color wheel, and I even learned that it was created by Sir Isaac Newton in 1706! So I had the students draw the basic wheel in their sketchbooks.

Next step was to figure out how many cookies I would need total and do the math. 200 kids x 6 cookies per color wheel...thats a lot of cookies! I got around 16 boxes of vanilla wafers and 7 containers of vanilla icing, I had food coloring, spoons and plates and cups on hand. I tried to find colored icing, but the Wal-Mart I went to didn't have much of a selection.

I have six tables, so each table got the plate pictured above with just enough icing for a quarter size amount of icing of each color for each student.(not shown a spoon for each color specifically for that cup) Six spoons for the kids at the table to mix the other colors.

I had some of the students who came early wash their hands and help divide the cookies onto plates.

Prepped and ready to go!

Working on the process of mixing colors.

A completed color wheel!

Time to take home, it's the rainbow!

I've never seen color look so delicious!

The students really enjoyed this! After we created our wheel by mixing the primary colors, we were able to review the different color schemes and because it was hands on, turning the wheel to see the different complimentary colors really worked to our advantage! To take them home we stacked our cookies in rainbow order or as some of us know ROY G. BIV. Great lesson I'll definitely do it again next year, maybe even this year as the kids wanted to do a wheel with the TWELVE colors, I even had students saying they'd even donate boxes of cookies and icing. We'll see!

Have you ever done the cookie color wheel in your room? How do you get your kids excited about color theory?