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Colors of Us

Draw people’s skin, eye, and hair colors.

Materials

  • crayons, including 2 or 3 packages of multicultural crayons or markers (8 per box, available from Crayola®)
  • paint chips in tones that resemble skin tones: shades of brown, beige, tan, pink, and off-white (if they are strips with many different shades, cut them up into individual chips)
  • wood stain color chips
  • paper and paper plates
  • paste
  • The Colors of Us by Karen Katz

Directions

This learning center builds on the activities children did last week: they read and discussed a book about skin color and made outlines of their hands, coloring them the color of their own skin tone. 

Have children draw or paint pictures of people’s different colors—skin, hair, or eye color, for example. Encourage them to make portraits or to trace their hands or feet. Display the book, The Colors of Us, for inspiration—the last page shows the many portraits that Lena painted of her friends and neighbors. Children may also want to make a collage of different skin colors, using paint chips that resemble skin tones.