Caterpillars and Butterflies in the Garden!

Last month I taught my students about "line" in Art when we were making a quilt with stripes. (To see that lesson click here.) At that point in time, I only taught them about straight lines. But, as I was looking through some different sources to help better teach my students about line, since we no longer have an Art teacher at our K-1 building. In my search, I came across two very good ones. The first one is Deep Space Sparkle. Deep Space Sparkle is a website that has Art Lesson's for kids. They have Art lessons for grades K-6. The other source I came across was Art's Attack. Art's Attack is a collection of DVD's that teach different Art lessons. If you go to their website, they have a free trial offer. Our school just purchased these DVD's with a grant that we received. 

I took both of these sources and combined them to make a Butterfly Garden in the hallway above my students lockers. I chose to do this because we had just finished up our unit on plants, and we had drawn flowers to hang in the hallway and our next unit was Butterflies! 

I started by reading the lessons on Deep Space Sparkle and watching the lesson on Line from Arts Attack so that I was prepared and knew where to start.  Caterpillars were first because caterpillars come before the Butterfly. 

Each student got a 8.5 X 11 piece of any color paper to practice on. Students come to the carpet with their clipboard and a black felt tip marker. On the smartboard, I brought up the painting "Woman in a Purple Coat" by Henri Matisse. In this painting there are several different types of line to show the students (thick, think, straight, curvy, contour, parallel...). As we discussed each of these lines, I modeled how to make that kind of line and then had the students do the same. 

Once students were done practicing, I showed them how to make a caterpillar using a large circle at first and then using backward C's (curved lines) to make the rest of the caterpillar's body. Then in each circle, I showed them some of the lines I could make. I then sent them off to their seats with a 9 X 12 paper and told them to make their caterpillar with large circles that went the length of the page. 

If you notice, the practice sheet is the purple sheet next to her work.

 
 I turned them loose and let them design their caterpillar making sure that each circle was different. 

 Since the caterpillars looks so incredibly awesome in black and white, I decided not to have them color them. We just cut them out and hung them in the hallway with our flowers, since caterpillars like to munch on leaves!

 Then since our caterpillars turned out so incredibly "cool", I decided to have students do the same with our butterflies. When I teach about drawing, designing and coloring butterflies, I also teach about symmetry. Thus, when the students drew a line on one side of the butterfly, they had to go to the other side of the butterfly and do the same. Again, I did some example lines and then sent them to their seats to get started. This time instead of leaving our butterflies black and white like we did the caterpillars, We colored our butterflies in with crayon.

When the butterflies were finished...they were hung in the butterfly garden above the flowers and caterpillars!

    

We finished up just in time for our real live butterflies to come out of their chrysalis's. We came to school today to discover that FIVE of our six butterflies popped out to join us!!! How exciting for a MONDAY!!!! 

 I hope you all have a fabulous week! 

We are off to the zoo on Thursday! My FAVORITE place for a field trip!