Textured Owl Collages

This project started with a reading of a non-fiction book about Owls and their habitats.  Any book from your school library will do for an introduction and a nice science link. :)  This project was created with Second Grade but could easily be adapted for higher grades.  I'm not sure you would want to go younger with this particular project as it has a LOT of steps.

 I have an old calender of owls that I took apart and laminated that we used as reference for body poses and for color references.  The calender owls stayed up for the duration of the project.  Kids had a fun time picking out which owl they wanted as "their owl".

More references I had on the board for the kids.

For the feet we used an "M" and then created the leg by doubling it and bringing it up into a rectangle.

Day One:  Read the book, discuss the owls and habitat.  Tell the class we're starting with the habitat first.  We used leaf stencils (bought from amazon.com) and warm colors and stamped our backgrounds.

Day Two:
  We added the construction paper tree, sketched our owl bodies and started tearing paper to fill the owls and create the soft "feathery" edges to make them look like owls.

Creating the owl feathers took quite a bit of time - almost three classes (this is not a project for the faint of heart or the short on time).

Last Day:
We added the eyes, feet and beaks.  Here's a few of the finished owls: