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...

Elephant Safari

This project is an elaboration the a project i saw on Deep Space Sparkle website 

( http://www.deepspacesparkle.com/2011/01/ink-elephant-art-lesson/)  But rather than stopping at just using the ink from the marker to paint with i had the students look at foreground, middle ground and background to add in some color.  We started the same way, i gave each student a picture of an elephant and simply told them to look and draw it, i had a lot of students worried about doing this in my 2nd grade classes, but they all drew wonderful elephants.   Next they added in a large sun set and a few trees to the back ground, followed by different plants in the middle and foregrounds.  They finished by painting with tempera cakes to add a punch of color.  The students all had fun and was a perfect lesson for my 2nd and 3rd graders.

K-1 Landscape Cows

 Foreground, Middle Ground, Back Ground-- the K-1 kiddos learned about this concept by first folding their paper in half to create a horizon line, then the drew a cow by tracing the body and head then connecting the pieces and adding the details.  They then learned that the cow was in the middle ground since its body crossed over the horizon line, they then added mountains and a sky in the background, small grass to the middle, and large blades of grass the the foreground.  Over all a very fun colorful project that they did a great job on!

^small notes on the board for them the reference while they worked to make sure they had all the parts of the cow and everything drawn in the correct grounds

 ^ We used colored crayons to draw in the details, helped to avoid showing pencil lines

 Above are two samples from Kindergarten classes and below are two from 1st graders, all did a great job making unique cows