4th Grade Owls

For those of you that don't know I travel between 3 different schools one school I have a classroom, the other two I have a cart and go room to room.  I see a lot of kids and not very often (only once every 8 schools days), it's a bummer because I have so many awesome things I want to do, but simply don't have the time.  At one of my schools I have a 4th grade teacher who will often ask me to come up with an art project that they can do in their classroom.  So when coming up with projects I like to come up with something that is very independent so the students can work on them when they finish an assignment early or have free time.

Here is the project I came up with.  

I explained the project briefly to the classroom teacher, I gave her a finished example, a step by step how to draw an owl, and an in progress example for the students to look at.  Here are some of the results.  Aren't they fun?  An independently done project finished with oil pastels.  They are also topped off with liquitex clear gloss varnish which kind of gives the oil pastels a beautiful painted look.  I like to use this rather than fixative if time allows.

This student comes from a Native American background.  In her culture, they see the owl as an omen so she chose to do another animal.  

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.