Friday, May 6, 2016

3rd Grade Dragonflies

I put together a slide show about Dragonflies. Did you know that a Dragonfly can fly up to 30 miles and hour? They eat hundreds of mosquitos a day? Can you tell the difference between a Dragonfly and a Damselfly? Our 3rd graders can!  After learning about these super cool insects, we drew them on black paper. I challenged them to draw a close up of a dragonfly, with parts going off of the paper, and diagonal.
These were redrawn with glue. After a week of drying,they were ready to be colored and blended with chalk pastels. This is a messy but beautiful process. Using either warm or cool colors, students began coloring their insects trying to glen a darker color around the edge of each shape. Fingers, and even faces got a little messy as we blended the chalks.  We were very careful to shake off dust into the trash can.
 Using the opposite color scheme, they colored and blended their backgrounds. The glue preserves a black line similar to a stained glass window. They are  very stunning! We had a little art show on my white board to admire all the finished art so far.