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Children experiment with colored light and shadows in a darkened classroom, using flashlights and transparent materials to project vibrant rainbow patterns across a wall and table.

$A student holds a clear prism in the beam of a flashlight during a hands-on light exploration activity, creating reflections and refractions across a tabletop in a dim classroom.$

A few upper elementary students stand together in an art classroom, closely examining materials and participating in a collaborative science and light exploration activity.

A teacher sits on a classroom table speaking with a group of students gathered around during a collaborative lesson in an art and science classroom filled with student artwork.

Close-up of a child’s hand illuminated by vivid red, blue, and green light while experimenting with colored flashlights and shadows against a glowing wall.

Two students stand facing one another in a dark classroom filled with colorful projected lights and shadows, smiling as they interact during a hands-on exploration activity.

$A student carefully positions a clear prism in front of a flashlight beam during a low-light science investigation exploring reflection and refraction.$

Two students lean over a table in a darkened classroom while experimenting with a bright red laser beam and translucent materials during a light study activity.

A young student stands with arms outstretched in front of a wall covered in overlapping rainbow-colored light projections and large shadows created during a classroom exploration of light and color.

May 7, 2026

Kathy Kolata

Upper elementary and junior high art students dove into the art and science of color recently, exploring how electromagnetic waves behave and how we perceive light in the visible spectrum. Students took apart a model of the eye and learned how the rods and cones of the retina receive light of specific wavelengths. They used ropes to simulate waves and investigated the relationship between wavelength and energy and the concept of polarization. They then experimented with polarized gels, rotating them to discover that aligned light waves can be completely blocked or allowed to pass, depending on the relative position of the gels. They got to see colorized images demonstrating how pit vipers perceive infrared light and birds and bees perceive ultraviolet wavelengths. Students learned about the differences between additive and subtractive color mixing and then used red, green, and blue flashlights to mix light directly–producing cyan, magenta, and yellow shadows. To wrap things up, students took turns manipulating prisms to reproduce Newton's famous optics experiments, separating white light into the full spectrum and then reassembling it back into white light. All of this sets the stage for an exploration of color theory.