This is round 2 of the 2nd grade Shape lesson. After some practice getting the hang of the procedure in the first round, you can view it here, these Male Western Tanager's came out just as fantastic as the American Robin's and Buntings. The only difference is this group used a 2nd tree branch.Concepts included were geometric shapes, overlapping shapes, ornamentation of shapes, and an introduction to 3-dimensional rendering of shapes.
Starting with a cool technique to make texture on their tree trunk, we tapped cardboard squares into black tempura paint. I asked the class if trees are flat, or 3 dimensional, can we put our arms around them? I showed them how to scrape their cardboard in a "smily face" motion "around" the trunk, instead of straight across. This will help give the illusion of a 3-dimensional form. They loved this technique!
We moved onto cutting, starting with squares and rectangles. Students were able to tell me how to cut semi-circles and triangles (including isosceles triangles) out of these quadrilateral shapes. After each shape was cut, we talked about how to place it - looking at the photographs to help us. Which shapes overlap another? Which shapes should we make sure are the right proportion to the rest of the shapes? Where would we glue our head and beak shapes if we want our bird to be looking up/down, left/right?
At the end, we used white and yellow pastels to add important features of these birds like the wing bars. We also learned the word "dactylic" (nifty!) - it means 2 feet in the front 2 in the back.
In the last minutes of class after clean up, we gathered around to listen to the songs/calls of the male Tanager sing using my nifty, mini, portable i-pod speakers.
Fun!
