The Nutcracker Landscape Paintings

This is a fantastic holiday lesson that I saw on the Deep Space Sparkle website HERE.

It's great for at-home learning as it comes with templates for the characters as well as a video tutorial.

I did this project with my Grades 4 - 6 students last year. I gave them the option of drawing their own Nutcracker character.

They started by drawing their fanciful trees on turquoise cardstock.

Paint the snow in white tempera.

Paint the trees various pastel colours.

Once dry, outline and add patterns.

Then they worked on their characters- coloured them and cut them out.

Glue onto the landscape and add some painted snow in the sky.

Some Grade 4 - 6 results- love how these turned out!

 

Birch Tree Watercolour Tape Paintings

Here are some recent birch tree paintings by my Grade 7-9 students. It's such a popular lesson and for good reason!  All students get great results from this lesson and adults love them- they're one of my most commented projects by my colleagues at school.

See the steps HERE  in my original post.

See other versions for younger students HERE.

 

Oil Pastel Birds

For this project, Grade 6 students choose from a variety of birds that I have printed out. I choose birds from our province (Alberta) but you could also choose to do birds of a different country. 

They choose a colour of 9 x 12" construction paper and sketch out the basic shape of the bird. 

I do a demonstration on how to do this. I encourage them to draw big and fill the page- this is a huge challenge for this age group I find. 

Once I approve their drawing they start with oil pastels. I've always used Pentel brand. 

They start using the lightest colours and always black last to prevent any unnecessary 

muddying or smears of black. 

This project took about 3- 40 minute periods or so to complete. 

Some of the finished Grade 6 works: