5th Grade African Animals

Who's having the best year ever? I'd say 5th grade hands down.  This year every single project we did in 5th grade was AWESOME.  Now, I'm not saying all of the other projects I did with the other grades weren't, but overall in 5th grade everyone enjoyed the projects, learned a lot, and were extremely successful in both the process and final product.  

Here are links to the projects we did this year:

Kandinsky Abstract Painting

Lego Self Portrait

Abstract vs Realism Still Life

Minion Sculpture

Van Gogh Irises

And to end the year students finished with this African Animal project.  I think this now tops my list of favorite art projects to do/teach.

We spent quite a few classes on them 4-5.  It was a very independent project, but there were endless possibilities.  Students created a border and used a packet I put together to help with the patterns.  I then put together about a 20 page packet of different animals.  To narrow it down I picked animals you would find in Africa, but of course there were always a few exceptions.  I did require students to use an animal from the packet, but they had about 50 different one's to choose from.  Some of the images in the packet were step by step how to draw, some where just clip art, and some were just of animal heads.  Students could choose how they wanted to show the animal.  Using oil pastels student filled in the entire thing. On the portion where the animal was I required students to overlap with at least two oil pastels or more on every single part.

I love these.  I think they are so cool.  These are just a small sample of the drawings 5th graders made, but I had to share a lot because they are SO AWESOME.

3rd Grade Owl Batik

This was kind of a long project for third graders, but it was quite the hoot (insert drum roll here).  This was about a 4-5 day project deepening on the class. 

1st day draw the owl.

2nd day use crayons to color in owl (PRESS HARD)

3rd Day watch batik demo (crumpling paper 8 times and going over with water down black tempera paint). Finish coloring with crayon and doing batik process.

4th day students were to have batik done and we did a directed painting for the background.

5th day add branch glue on owl.

There were so many steps in this project and one of the reasons why it took so long for us to finish was because this was very much a project where students kept their own pace.  We all know the work speeds of students vary tremendously! So some of the steps were prolonged to enable other students to catch up. On the 5th day it only took us about ten minutes to finish and then we started on our next project.  For those students who seemed to be waiting for the next step I had a filler activity whether that be a handout or reading they would do and if they still finished that I asked them to help someone who wasn't finished.

Overall I love the results.  I'd like to see what I could do the next go around to make the project go a little quicker.