Can you get your hands on a few theater lights and some gel? I taught tech at a theater camp this summer and did an activity that might fit your bill perfectly.
Get 3 stage lights of any sort you can get. I just used a few PARs because they already had edisons on them and I didn't need to adapt anything. Hang them in a room on anything you can find, but not so high up that the kids or you can't reach them. Coat/ costume/ clothing racks work great if you're only using lightweight aluminum PARs like I did. Arrange them in a 3 point setup around a chair. Just run extension cords and plug them into the wall somewhere. Also setup a table close by with a bunch of scrap unsorted gel bits.
When the kids showed up I gave a bit of a lecture about stage lighting in general, passed out some swatchbooks and talked about color as well as directionality. Focused on how lighting is used to evoke different emotions, moods and locations. I then split them up into groups and had each group pick an emotion or location to try and evoke with lighting. They then went off to the gel pile and picked colors.
Once every group has done this I sat them all down around the mini lighting rig and each group would come up, drop their gels into the lights, one group member would sit in the chair and the rest of the class would try and guess what the emotion or location was. We would then discuss and critique their choices.
Worked well for me with kids 7-14 in groups from 9 kids up to 22 or 23. Lots of room to simplify or expand as well.
Hope that helps! I'd be glad to answer any other question you may have!
Related to the idea above, one of my favorite projects as a student was choosing a classical painting and "recreating" it in the light lab. Props and costumes aren't critical, any simple furniture will usually suffice. This project does encourage you to look very closely at hightlight and shadow and to discover where the painters "cheated" for the sake of composition. This offers a great lesson on lighitng angle, intensity, color and mood as well as a good introduction to artists like Caravaggio who had a strong sense of lighting (if not reality) in his work.
you just need a print out of a picture and some lights. where you compare the light in the painting with your physical lights on your staged version of the picture. IE get the mona lisa, put someone in a chair and try to light your person in the same way the mona lisa is lit in the painting. Shouldn't need anything other than that
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