Thursday, October 7, 2010

Leapin' Lizards!




Hi, I'm Mrs. Davis and I love doing work on black paper! Admitting it is the first step, right?!

I love these lizards that my fifth graders made using simple supplies: chalk, black paper, and glue!
The first thing we did was use a pencil to draw a cool-looking lizard (quite large) on black paper. The only "problem" we had was that most kids tend to draw things quite small, so I had to give them some parameters for their work--the lizard had to be almost touching each side of the paper.

After drawing in pencil they "traced" the pencil with white glue. I love using this technique! The glue resist gives awesome black outlines and "borders" for the chalk which is done the following week. The kids love to trace with glue. What can I say?!

The following week I gave them all sorts of colored chalk (we prefer the Crayola chalk- the colors are SO vibrant and show up so opaque on black paper!!!) and they went to town. Some kids wanted to keep the lizard sort of "life-like" (read: greens and browns) while most kids wanted to go wild with pinks or blues. Either way, they turned out fabulous and they were the talk of the school whilst hanging on bulletin boards!

While the chalk is VERY messy, everyone just loved how they came out and didn't mind a little mess at the end :)

Happy creating!

5 comments:

  1. These look great! Out of curiosity, did you use sidewalk chalk or chalk pastels?

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  2. we used regular crayola chalk :) not oil pastels. i don't have any of the boxes---they're emptied into trays---to look at the label for you! the chalk comes in really bright, vibrant colors, but i'm sure you could use oil pastels with the same effect! good luck!!!

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    1. Just wondering how you taught the kids to draw these. Did you have a hand out, or did you demo the drawing process?

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    2. I have an activ board and a document camera and that is how I demo projects. I really just have the kids the general shape of the body and tail, then showed them the options they had from there :) good luck!

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  3. These turned out great! What a cute project!

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