Colors Affecting Moods
Problem-Based Learning
Name: Kristen Shupe
Name: Rachel Gebhardt
Topic: Colors and Emotion
Part 1: Driving question:
What are your three initial driving questions?
Where do colors get their names?
Do all people see in color?
Do colors affect how you feel?
What is your one, final driving question?
Do colors affect how you feel?
Background information of this driving question:
What grade level are you working? Kindergarten
Which standard are you targeting? K.7.2 Discriminate between types of lines (characteristics), shapes (geometric), textures (tactile), and colors (primary/secondary hues) in own work and the work of others.
Provide any background information the reader should know about this project, such as time span, schedule and so on. This activity could be done over two days- about an hour or so spent each day. The first day will consist of an introduction to the project as well as activities and the beginning of their posters. The second day will consist of the finalization of posters and the groups presenting their findings. Materials required would include construction paper, wooden sticks to paste the different colored paper on, a laminator, dry erase markers, projector to watch the video, markers, glue, and other craft essentials.
Provide a brief introduction to your question as well and an overview to what you envision your lesson looking like. This question will get our students to think about what emotions colors may make them feel, if any. After our grabber, we will provide poster boards and any materials the students may need to create a poster that they will present to the class their findings: what colors caused what emotions. The activities we do between them creating their posters will help them think more about the possible emotions felt when looking at specific colors.
Why do you think this is a good driving question?
Try to answer these 4 questions. (But you should not answer them with yes or no, instead explain the details and convince me that you’ve met these criteria)
Does the DQ warrant in-depth study? The DQ warrants an in depth study because the Kindergarten students will have to go around and ask other students how they feel about specific colors and the emotions they feel when they see them. It connects colors to emotions for students and shows the commonly associated emotions and colors.
Is the DQ an authentic and relevant issue/problem for my students? The colors that students are surrounded by may be affecting their mood without even knowing it. The emotional reactions the majority of students feel when seeing the colors could be affecting all the students in different ways. After this activity, they can see all the different reactions that their classmates are feeling when shown certain colors. This is an authentic and relevant problem for students because they work with colors throughout their entire lives (coloring, clothing, paint, etc).
Is there more than one plausible solution to the DQ? Yes, there is more than one plausible solution to the DQ. Each student could feel differently when they see each color, because not all students feel the same emotions the same way or to the same extent. So, a student could feel sad when they see blue, and another could feel calm when they see blue. There are commonly associated colors linked to certain emotions, but all students could find a different solution.
Does the DQ provide opportunities for students to evaluate, analyze, present, and defend their solutions? Yes, the students can evaluate by finding each student’s emotional reaction to seeing the different colors. After finding the emotions of each student linked to a specific color, they can analyze their findings and how many students felt each emotion when seeing the color. The students can present their findings to the class by creating a poster board to defend their solutions about what emotions were felt after seeing each color (majority of students felt…).
https://www.education.com/science-fair/article/color-effect-on-emotions/
http://www.houzz.com/ideabooks/16866284/list/kids-room-color-wisdom-how-colors-affect-behavior
https://www.kaplanco.com/ii/using-color-to-enhance-learning
(helpful articles we’re referencing throughout this project--ignore)
Part2: Grabber
What is your grabber?
Students will draw faces/pictures on laminated colored construction paper the first emotion felt when shown different colors.
Why do you think this grabber is beneficial and how it align with your driving question?
Does the story, article, video, announcement, role play, or other resource hook the learner into asking more questions about the topic?
This will get them to think about how the colors make them feel and get them interested in learning more about the connections between colors and certain emotions. The students may gain even more interest after seeing that their classmates may have had similar or completely different emotions related to the same color.
Does the grabber capitalize on novelty and/or high emotion situations?
Yes because the students could get excited or confused about why other students may have reacted the way they did to the color- especially if a classmate had a different reaction than they did to the color.
Does the grabber establish authenticity & relevance?
Yes, it is relevant to the overall topic because this is the student’s first glimpse at how colors affect emotions. The grabber will capture their attention, especially as we continue to show them different colors.
Make sure to explain in detail how this grabber would be used.
We will cut out circles of different colors, laminate them, and attach wooden sticks to them so the students can hold them up for about 15 seconds. After the students have every color, we will hold up a color and have them draw on the circle how the color makes them feel (ex: draw a smiley face when seeing the color yellow).
Activity 1
What is your first activity?
List the name of your activity here. And explain how it would be implemented in the class, describe the process, such as how to group your students, when to present information to your students, what resources you will use, what students will create or share, etc.
The first activity the students will do is use the table that we created for them to gather the data. We will create this table by having one column be the colors (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink, black) and the other columns will be the many different emotions the students may have felt when being shown the color. The students will be separated into groups and will mark tallies for each emotion those in their group felt about the specific colors.
Why do you think this is a good activity for PBL?
How is the activity authentic?
This activity is authentic because we are creating our own tables for the students to fill out. Also, the students being separated into groups and only collecting their group’s data will allow for the possibility that each group’s findings may be different.
Does the activity provide students with the opportunity to present and defend problem solution?
Activity 1 asks the students to collect the data by asking those in their groups how they felt when shown a specific color. They will present and defend their data in Activity 2, which is correlated to this activity.
Does the activity require student collaboration?
This activity does require student collaboration because they will be put into groups and then asked to collect data based on the reactions their group members had to the colors.
How will I judge what students have learned from the activity?
The students will be judged by showing us their tables before moving to Activity 2 so we can make sure that they collected all of their group member’s data correctly. This will be done by making sure they have the right amount of tallies under each color.
Activity 2
What is your second activity?
List the name of your activity here. And explain how it would be implemented in the class, describe the process, such as how to group your students, when to present information to your students, what resources you will use, what students will create or share, etc.
The second activity is that the students would be put into groups and creating a poster presentation of their findings. Their findings would include the different emotions their classmates felt when seeing different colors (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple, Pink, Black). They would total the overall numbers of each emotion and present to the rest of the class what emotion they think each color brings. Each group may have different solutions from their findings, but will have to defend and explain their solutions. They could do this by the amount of students felt each emotion.
Why do you think this is a good activity for PBL?
How is the activity authentic?
The activity is authentic because they are all creating their own group poster presentation. Therefore, each group may have a different poster and different findings that make each group’s poster from the previous activity authentic to their own data.
Does the activity provide students with the opportunity to present and defend problem solution?
Each group of students will have to present and defend their solution to what emotions are felt from each color. During the presentation the groups will show their data from Activity 1 and what emotions they think are prominent when shown the different colors.
Does the activity require student collaboration?
Yes, the activity requires student collaboration because the students will be working in groups to create their own presentation of their findings. The students will be working as a group to present their presentation as well as working together to create the actual presentation.
How will I judge what students have learned from the activity? (You will need to create a rubric for this step and potential example materials as well)
I will judge what students have learned from the activity by organization of their material, the content of the poster (the colors linked to the different emotions, tally marks to show the data, explaining that many people can have different emotions when seeing certain colors, but the students will explain what they found from the majority. (Rubric attached at the bottom)
Activity 3
What is your third activity? (Inside out clip)
Inside Out movie: expresses emotions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siXK7721rrw
List the name of your activity here. And explain how it would be implemented in the class, describe the process, such as how to group your students, when to present information to your students, what resources you will use, what students will create or share, etc.
The third activity would be showing the students the “Expresses Emotions” clip from the movie “Inside Out”. This clip shows the 5 basic emotions of (Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust). Each of these emotions is correlated with a color as well (Joy is yellow, Sadness is blue, Anger is red, Fear is purple, and Disgust is green). The students watching will be engaged as they watch each emotion demonstrated in the young girl as well as the visual image of the emotion itself in an animation. After watching the first time, the students will look at their data and see if these colors matched up with the same emotions in the movie clip. Then, we will play the clip again. We will then talk about the different results the students collected in comparison to the movie emotions and how all people can have different emotions correlating to different colors, but there are commonly associated colors with certain emotions.
Why do you think this is a good activity for PBL?
Try to answer these 4 questions. (But you should not answer them with yes or no, instead explain the details and convince me that you’ve met these criteria)
How is the activity authentic?
This activity is authentic because it is an original Pixar Animated Movie that helps that students understand the correlation between commonly associated emotions and colors.
Does the activity provide students with the opportunity to present and defend problem solution?
The students will be able to present and defend what they found with their findings and explain why it does or does not correlate with the movie.
Does the activity require student collaboration?
This activity requires student collaboration because it will take place in a large group discussion. The students will work off one in the conversation to express new ideas or findings throughout the conversation.
How will I judge what students have learned from the activity? (You will need to create a rubric for this step and potential example materials as well.)
We will judge what students have learned through the group discussion that takes place. The students should be able to understand that there are colors that bring about different emotions, but there are commonly associated feelings and colors in the world today.
