Endangered Animals

My 2/3 graders LOVE to free draw so to work on improving their drawing skills i have introduced them to "How to Draw Sheets".  They are learning about Endangered animals in Science and so i put out my collection of Endangered Animal Drawing Sheets for them to use.
 Their task was simple:
day 1- Follow the steps to draw their animal BIG on the piece of colored paper that best represented its habitat.
day 2-  out line the animal and add in at least 3 objects that help show what the animals habitat is. (the drawing sheets have a small paragraph explaining where the animal lives and why it is endangered that they were to read to help them draw)
day 3- i played around with how i wanted them to fill in the color a bit so some classes used Chalk Pastels and filled in (came out kinda messy, maybe too detailed for this age group to do), some Painted them in with Tempera Cakes (the color didn't stand out too well on the colored paper background.) then most classes and the photos show the ones who colored in the animals with Construction paper crayons, good color they just really needed to slow down to make the crayon neat.

Over all a GREAT drawing project which forced the kids to thing BIG, just a few kinks to work out for the future on how i want to finish it.



One of the students did this during a free draw with these sheets and thus im inspiration for the project:
So fun and creative for a 2nd grader!!

 Samples from day 2 on...

Mothers Day Flowers

I found this sweet little projects on the art blog Kids Artist this morning and had to try it out! http://kidsartists.blogspot.com/2011/02/wild-flowers.html

Changed it a little to work with what i had on hand and had the kids use different colors of Green construction paper crayon on 18x12 black paper to create the stems then using just the Tip of the brush the created the yellow center with Tempera Paint then used the same technique for the white petals.

LOVE how they are coming out and only took ONE 40min class to complete!

Thanks for the great idea Kids Artists!!!!

Big FAT Hen

As seen in a few varieties done by different art teachers I too have created my own version of the popular lesson on Keith Backer's "Big Fat Hen".  My 4th and 5th graders first looked through the book noting the style of his illustrations and then discussed what an illustrator does.  After this each students received a piece of colored paper and picked a copy of one of the hens from the book to attempt to draw, no directions given on how to draw it other than hinting to starting with the head and breaking it down into simple shapes then adding details.  Then they finished by using all construction paper crayons to make the colors of the hens pop, noting that Backer did not draw boring white, brown and black hens but bright colorful ones.   They also were told to add one detail to the bottom of the hen, a bug, chick, egg or whatever they felt fit.  Some chose to add color to the background, others didn't, over all a very fun drawing lesson that caused them to work independently and push themselves to truly see rather than just look at a picture.

Peacocks!

\

K1 made these fun pattern Peacocks!  They started by tracing a body template of a peacock then cutting it out and gluing it to their paper.  They then added the feathers looking at the patterns in real feathers.  They started by adding the circles with 3 colors then a BUNCH of little feather lines to show the texture in the feathers. Some came out better than others but for K-1 they aren't to bad.