I love tempera cakes for painting with my younger students. I find them to be a huge time saver for classroom instruction, setting up and in cleaning up.
I love giving students as many color choices as possible to paint with, but there are also times when I only want them to paint with certain colors. I finally came up with this very simple way of organizing my painting palettes, which I can't believe I didn't think of sooner. With this system, I can keep better track of which table is getting what for supplies. As an extra bonus, this system makes it easy for students to help with distribution of set up and clean up of the materials.
I have each paint tray labeled with a number. On days when children are allowed to use as many colors as they like for painting, I give each table a tray labeled 1, 2 and 3. As you can see it has a wide range of painting cakes to choose from. What is important to note, is that every tray 1 is exactly the same, every tray 2 is the same and every tray 3 is the same. This way the children know that every table has the exact same selection of colors.
This is a photograph of what it looks like when the trays are returned to the storage closet. I just stack them. You can also see that I have trays of warm colors, cool colors and black. Behind them are primary and secondary colors.
This system is working quite well for me. Who knows, maybe it will work for you, too?
Happy Painting!
