Penguins in Watercolour

I've started my 'winter' themed lessons with my younger students, even though it (surprisingly) hasn't snowed here yet. Kids love penguins so I knew this project would be a hit with them.

I used one of the drawing lessons from Art Projects for Kids. Kathy always has amazing step-by-step drawing lessons that really help some students. I gave my Grade 2 students the option of using the drawing handout (after I demonstrated it to them) or to draw their own penguin. 

Once drawn, they outlined it in Sharpie then used watercolours to paint them. 

I love all the different personalities!

I think this is a Harry Potter penguin, haha!

Another Harry Potter penguin- with a wand!

Large Decorative Poppies

Posting these a little late for Remembrance Day (Nov 11th here in Canada), so sorry about that! 

Maybe use this idea for next year?!

I was inspired by THIS post on the wonderful Painted Paper website.

I was asked to make decorations for our school's Remembrance Day assembly. I wanted something large and simple- effective and 'eye-popping' enough to decorate a gym. I also left this until the last minute so needed something fairly straightforward so a couple of my classes could 'mass produce' them, haha! Luckily my Grades 4-6 students seemed to really enjoy making them.

I have them for an 80 minute period- each student made between one and two large poppies during that time. There is some waiting time while the petals dry.

On 11 x 17 photocopy paper I traced two large hearts- these were the petals. I made a ton of photocopies of these as each students needed to paint 6 hearts/petals (3 sheets per student).

They used tempera pucks/discs for these. 

We ran out of room in my small drying rack fairly quickly so spread them out onto the floor to dry.

Once dry, cut out 6 hearts. Glue these together into a poppy shape using white glue.

For the centers, I used the same sort of style that was shown on the Painted Paper website.

I traced circles onto black construction paper and cut up small squares of black tissue paper.

Cut out the circle and cut a fringe around the outside edges. 

Glue onto poppy.

Then scrumple up the tissue paper and glue onto the black paper.

Pretty nice but not finished yet!

Make sure students write their names on the back.

For some reason I wanted to varnish these- I felt it made them a bit sturdier and just 'nicer' looking overall. I hate the dry texture that tempera pucks leave. They're so convenient to use with large classes but the chalky finish bothers me. However varnishing them is totally optional.

I watered down some 'modge podge' type varnish and painted all the poppies 

(a teacher on her break came and helped me, thank god, as it took forever!)

Unfortunately I forgot to take a photo of them in the gym for our assembly, but we used clear packing tape loops on the back to stick them to our painted cinder block walls. They stayed up for the entire 45 minute assembly and were very easy to take down and didn't affect the wall finish.