Personally, I feel that my biggest opportunity to "sell" my program and "hook" students is with my first graders. When students are kinders my biggest goal is simply for them to become comfortable in the art room and with me. My second goal for kinders is to expose them to as much as possible.
Once students are first graders I really want them to feel like "big kids" in the art room and I give them many responsibilities. (More on that in another post). I also try to have a lot of short projects so that the kids will have many opportunities to practice these new responsibilities.
I want each project to introduce the kids to something new, and this project is perfect. When I pass out the paper the kids are always exclaiming how big the paper is. It's really not that big the paper is 12 x 18.
Before we begin the owls we spend a little time making patterns. We use a 9 x 12 paper and section it off into a 3 x 3 grid. We then brainstorm to come up with different ideas for patterns (or as the kids call them designs) that we can use to fill a space. By the time we finish the 9 squares the kids have a pretty good idea how to fill a space with a pattern, rather than simply coloring it in.
I then take the kids through a step by step directed drawing process to draw the owl. Whenever I do a directed drawing I give the kids different places in the drawing where they have different choices. I want them making original thought decisions as soon as possible.
Once the pencil drawing is done the kids are able to choose as many different skinny markers as they wish to trace over their pencil lines and then fill the spaces with patterns.
To finish the project, the kids cut out the owls and glue them onto construction paper.
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