GEMS Color Analyzers

Farah El Zein & John Cienki

This is a teacher’s guide about investigating light and color for grades 5-8. The 4 sessions of activities in this guide (58 pages) quickly draw the students into investigations of light and color that lead to a better understanding of why different objects appear to be different colors. In the first session, the students use colored light filters to decode secret messages. In the second session, the students will apply what they learned to create their own secret messages. In the third session, given “diffraction grating”, a plastic material used by scientists to investigate light, the students describe what colors they can see from different light sources. They also get the chance to discover that no colors are seen in a dark room. Other activities in the fourth session of this guide help students synthesize what they already observed in previous activities and expand their understanding of how people perceive color. The materials needed for this unit can be obtained locally, except for the diffraction grating and color filters. After the 4 sessions, the teacher finds two important sections: “Going Further”, additional suggested activities, and “Behind the Scenes”, background information about light and color. What students do grasp during this unit will be of great value when they study light and color in future years.