Now it’s time to decide what colors you’ll be using for your weekly watercolor activity. Deciding on the colors was one of my favorite parts of designing my own curriculum. I got to choose colors that made sense for the festivals we were celebrating and for the changing colors around us outside.

I varied the number of colors I used. Often in Waldorf kindergarten, students will use one color at a time, and sometimes up to three primary colors. We did that for our first year of kindergarten, and I wanted to do something different for our second year. I tried to include at least one session for each color to be used on its own. On other weeks, I planned for two to seven colors. I premixed colors using our set of primary colors.

To make your watercolor plan, first look through your monthly calendars to see if you want to use any special colors for the festivals. Write those down on your watercolor day for those weeks. Remember that you can use any colors that feel right to you. If you’re more of a “blue” rather than a “red and green” kind of Christmas person, you might want to paint with blue near Christmas.

Once you’ve written down your colors for the festivals, start at the beginning of your homeschool year and think about what colors are around you outside at that time of year. Since we start in September and live in Ohio, we painted a transition from green to yellow to orange over the first four weeks.

If it’s difficult to use seasonal colors for part of the year, take a look at your themes. Where I live, most of the trees are bare in the winter, and there aren’t many colors to see. I took inspiration from the sky because one of our themes is stars, and I planned for blue, purple, and yellow.

If you live somewhere that doesn’t have dramatic seasonal changes, look for some subtler changes. When I lived in Florida, the purple sea grapes were ripe in the fall, and the robins, with their red breasts, migrated through in the spring.

You’re almost done creating your own kindergarten homeschool curriculum!