Happy Jan-u-Beary!

Happy New Year everyone!  Hope your Jan-u-beary is going well!  

This marking period is all about shape for second grade.  So to start us off right I have a set of bear related shape projects for Jan-u-beary. I raided the school library for any non-fiction books about bears I could find.  After all, we have to make those cross-curricular connections, right?

Here's what I found.

We started with Grizzly bears first.  All my classes were enraptured by the bears, especially the pages with baby cubs!  After the book we did a brief directed drawing lesson.  I rarely do directed drawing with older students and reserve it mostly for the younger crowd.  It has its place especially for a project like this that has multiple drawing steps.  Kids will sometimes forget what steps to do or do them in the wrong order when trying them on their own.  Directed drawing can be a good way to make sure everyone is attentive and following directions and helps build confidence as everyone's picture will be successful.  And yet, everyone's picture will be slightly different too as each child will draw with his or her own unique style.  

I had everyone take a piece of drawing paper and a multicultural crayon.  I keep my skin color crayons in a separate container for projects just like this.  I explained that just like people the bears can have dark, medium and light fur colors.  All those lovely different browns are perfect for the bears.  We started with the medium sized heart in the middle for our grizzly's nose.  After that, an upside-down heart for the bear's muzzle.  A double half circle underneath for the bottom lip.  Triangles for teeth and a letter "m" for the tongue.  Now here, I will often stop and tell the class that if they drew a smaller bear (more cub-sized) they may not be able to fit the teeth and tongue in.  I tell them to leave it out if they need to.  Better to leave out detail then cram it in and make a mess of things.  Two circles follow for the eyes.  The next step is a half circle above the eyes for the top of the head.  This will become two jagged lines for the furry cheeks.  Add two ears, some shoulders and Voila!  Instant Grizzly Bear portraits!

Here's a sampling below:

I let them choose their own backgrounds.

For some reason a lot of them didn't color in the bottom of the jaw.

 For our next Jan-u-beary project we went with Panda Bears, which as it turns out, aren't bears at all.  They're giant cousins to the raccoon.  The kids really got into the panda book, especially when they found out that there were less then 800 left in the world, down from over 65,000 back in 1900.  Conservation starts early.  

For this project we painted our pandas.  Everyone got a brush and green paper. Each table had a tray with black and white tempera.  I did a quick demo of the painting steps.  The white goes first - circle for the head and an oval for the body.  They wiped their brushes off on the edge of the trays and then added black circles for the ears, eye patches, and nose.  Black ovals for front and back legs, along with black circles for paws complete the panda.  

They looked something like this:

Next class when the pandas were dry we used oil crayons and added grass, the mouth and bamboo plants.  As a final touch we glued wiggle eyes on.  Adds something to the personality of the bears, I think. 

The final product:

Adorable, aren't they?  Next up, Polar Bears made from model magic.  I'll post pics of those once all my classes are finished with them.

And don't be upset if you've missed doing your own Jan-u-Beary with your students.  After all, next month is Feb-u-beary, isn't it?