Food Chain Collage

This was a collaborative project I did with one of the Science teachers at my school. He was teaching his kids about food chains and wanted an art project to go along with it. He found THIS image via Pinterest as initial inspiration for the project. 

UPDATE: The poster was designed by art director and illustrator Dhanashri Ubhayakar for the magazine Sanctuary Asia, an Indian nature and wildlife conservation magazine.

I turned the digital image into a collage project using construction paper.

I used 12 x 18" construction paper. Have a background colour (in my case, turquoise). Then start with your largest animal (the top predator, I guess... the Science teacher explained this part to the kids, heh, heh)

I folded my paper vertically so I only had to draw half the polar bear and it also made it symmetrical. I collaged on the eyes, nose and teeth from scraps of paper.

Then make all the other animals slightly smaller... 

My messy workspace below....

Ok- once you have all the animals (our students were required to have 3 animals plus a plant) 

it's time to layer them and glue it all together.

This took some fiddling and such, but I found it easiest to lay it all out and then start from gluing the smallest middle part first (the plant- I lost my mini tree) and work your way up. 

I used dots of white glue. It went faster than using a glue stick.

Grade 7 student results!

      

      

    

Snow Bears

This is a great winter lesson I've had success with in the past. I found the project on the website 

"Art Projects for Kids" HERE. Kathy's always great in providing amazing step-by-step drawing instructions of you like to do guided drawing projects with your students. 

I find these types of lessons help my weaker students have more success- 

breaking it down into small steps really seems to help them.

So my Grade 1 kids drew along with me in pencil. Then they added patterns and details to their clothing. They outlined their drawings in Sharpies.

Then I did a brief watercolour painting demo for them. They drew snowflakes in the sky first using a white wax crayon- press hard! Then they painted the sky, then the clothing.

They all really enjoyed this project! 

This took one- 40 minute period for all but 5 students to finish, but it was definitely rushed!

Next time I'd break it down into two periods.

Grade 1 artwork:

Colour Theory with Juggling Clowns!

Clowns creep me out- always have. However, I find children's drawings of clowns delightful!

So this is a little colour theory lesson to help my Grade 1 students remember their secondary colours.

I show them some ways to draw a simple clown- we talk about simple shapes and patterns they might use. They draw these in pencil, colour in with markers and outline with a black marker.

Then we move on to the 'balls'. (I literally had to say the word 'balls' about 50 times during this project: "Cut our your balls carefully! Don't lose you balls! Keep your balls in a pile after you cut them out! Did someone lose a ball? I found one on the floor! OK, glue on your balls now!")  hahaha!

I traced a small vitamin lid 6 times in a row- then photocopied this a bunch of times so I had one strip per student. (there was probably an easier way to do this in Word but oh well...) 

We reviewed colour mixing and how to get secondary colours. You could have student paint these with tempera or watercolour. But I was on a time crunch, so we used oil pastels.

Then the balls get cut out and glued onto the clown paper. This took about 2- 40 minute periods for all students to complete. This project is also a great lesson in practising their cutting skills, as the circles were somewhat small and tricky for some to cut out.

Grade 1 results!

Canadian Birds in Oil Pastel

I was recently asked by a colleague, who was travelling to Nicaragua, if I could get any of my students to make some artwork that he could take to a local school he was visiting. I decided to have my Grade 4's (who are super sweet and very generous- I knew they'd have no problem donating their art) make oil pastel drawings of Canadian birds. 

So the students chose their own birds from a big folder of photos I collected on my laptop. We used red and blue construction paper. I printed off a photo reference for each student. They sketched in the basic shapes first, then coloured away. 

I encouraged them to lay down the colour really thick, to mix colours, and 

to create any type of background/habitat they wanted.

I was really happy how they turned out and was sad to see them go!  

Falcon

Bald Eagle - not only in America!

Canada Goose

Northern Cardinal

Mallard

Snowy Owl

Belted Kingfisher

Mountain Bluebird

Swallow

Loon

Robin

Red Throated Hummingbird

Woodpecker