Imaginary Creature Paintings

This lesson was inspired by the children's book "The Zlooksh" by French-Canadian author Dominique Demers. In the early 2000's, this book was distributed free to 500,00 Grade 1 students across Canada by a National bank. Many of my older students remembered reading this book as a child (God, makes me feel old!)

The Zlooksh is a charming story about a young boy named Zachary who, when asked by his teacher to draw a picture of his favourite animal, uses his imagination to create an animal that can't be found anywhere.(source)

After reading the book to my Grade 2 students, they were challenged to draw their own imaginary animal and come up with a name for it. They drew it on 12 x 18" white paper, then outlined everything in Sharpie.

Once outlined, they painted it using handy-dandy tempera pucks.

It was really fun watching what they came up with!

Once dry, they 'bubble cut' around it and also cut out the name and glued it 

somewhere on their creature.

Here are some of their imaginary creatures :)

Heart Snail Collage

This is an adorable collage activity that I found on the website "Crafty Morning". 

Instead of construction paper (the type I order is a bit dull) we used colored photocopy paper: a combination of the 'brights' and 'pastels'. 

They used the light green to draw a slug type body and cut that out. Then they chose three sheets of paper to create the heart shell (we discuss choosing contrasting colours when choosing the colours they want). They folded a sheet of paper in half and drew the largest half a heart shape they could. I encouraged them to really try to reach all the edges, as this would be the largest heart. 

No matter how many times I teach my elementary kids how to make a symmetrical heart from a sheet of folded paper, there's always at least a couple of kids who really struggle with the concept. I demonstrate to them in person, show them the fold line, and the importance of starting the pencil line on the folded edge, not the open edge. They do practice hearts on scrap paper. But even so, when it comes down to making their good copy hearts, always a couple go through like three sheets of coloured paper until they get it right! Any tips for me?? I swear to God this is one of the hardest concepts for me to teach so that ALL my kids get it right! I think next time I'll also show them a video on my big screen TV and hopefully that will help. 

Anyway, once they cut out the largest heart shape, they use this as a template to create the rest of the hearts. They trace the large heart onto the next colour of paper, but then trace inside of it slightly, about 1 cm, to create a slightly smaller heart. Cut it out and this is the middle heart. Do it one more time to create the smallest heart. I challenge advanced students to create four (or more) hearts. Glue those together with a glue stick and then glue onto the slug body. Then they cut out eyes and the 'antennae' thing-a-ma-bobs (I actually Googled what they really are and they're not antennae as I kept referring to them to my kids: The tentacles that stick out from the head of a snail are not its “feelers” as most people believe. On the ends of those tentacles are the snail’s eyes.)

Anyway, whatever, haha! We added extra eyes on the head and then two small hearts from scrap paper on top of the tentacles. 

This project always surprise me how challenging creating the hearts can be for some students. I feel the project is too easy for my Grade 3's but a bit too challenging for alot of my Grade 2's. Nonetheless everyone managed to finish and it took about 2- 40 minute periods in total. 

I love how they all came out :)

3D Box Hearts

I found this super cute lesson on the blog Mrs. T's First Grade Class. 

I knew my Grade 3's would love making the 3D box as many of them are SUPER into origami.

Mrs. T outlines all the steps on her blog :) Basically you take a square of black paper and draw 4 lines around it using the width of a ruler as a guide. 

Then cut, score, fold and glue and you have a cute shallow box.

My students had the choice to make their own symmetrical heart from a sheet of folded paper (they used this heart as a template to trace into their black paper) or draw their own heart directly onto the black paper. Most chose to create a symmetrical heart first. Then they coloured in the heart and the background using oil pastels. To make the heart 'pop' out a bit more, they traced around it using a black pencil crayon.

Construction paper isn't that great to fold- it's soft and doesn't make a crisp fold easily. So I showed my kids how to score their lines using an open pair of scissors and their ruler. 

This helped them along to create a clean line for easier and cleaner folding.

They cut four vertical cuts to create their tabs, then folded them in and 

used a glue stick to secure the tabs. 

Everyone managed to finish in one 40 minute period- I was impressed! Only about three in the class really struggled with the folding and creating of the box. The rest had no problem at all.

We also made mini hearts to add to the display.

For my bulletin board display I use two tacks per box to kinda 'hang' the boxes on. 

It looked great at first, but after about an hour, they all started falling off.

before

after 

So I ended up re-arranging it all a bit and a junior high student suggested putting a sewing pin through the top of each box. That worked perfectly :)