Friday, October 21, 2011

Wild Things from Suffield, 2011-2012!


    It's wild thing time again!  I love coming up with new artworks to try with my students, but some I love so much that I do them every year!  I love to see the creative wild things the first graders come up with after reading one of my favorite books ever.  Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak is a story about a little boy who uses his imagination to cope with the consequence he receives for being disrespectful to his mom.  This is one of my ultimate hopes for all of my students: to get creative and to use your imagination in response to difficult situations. 

    The artwork is really simple.  The students look at pictures of Sendak's Wild Things, and then draw their own, using his illustrations as inspiration.  I tell the students to first draw eyes somewhere near the tops of their papers, then draw a nose and mouth below them, add ears, and then draw the face shape around those features.  This seems to give everyone a good place to start.  The students add at least two patterns to their drawings, then we trace them with permanent markers and color with crayons.  We create the landscape habitats on separate paper with oil pastels and watercolors, cut the wild things out, and then glue them into their habitats.









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