Swimmy!

I love using books in my classroom and one of my favorite authors is Leo Lionni. This project was inspired by Swimmy, the story of a brave little fish. This was a fun and somewhat messy project to create, but the results were great! We used liquid watercolors to paint our papers and paper doilies. The next day we cut them up to make our beautiful collages. The results were so impressive and the kids really had fun making the coral out of paper doilies!

Watercolor Works!

We just completed two very successful lessons from the inspiring blog, Deep Space Sparkle (www.deepspacesparkle.com).

Fourth graders were given a variety tropical fish images. They drew serveral fish and then began on layered backgrounds with seaweed, coral, rocks, etc. They painted with Crayola watercolor paints and outlined with black marker to finish.

 Fifth graders looked at pictures of chameleons and spent time drawing, painting, and outlining. The background for the chameleons were made with smeared chalk, a technique I re-discovered during an inspiring workshop with other art teachers!

I was impressed with how much the children could do with these projects and my students were equally excited about how many compliments their works earned!!