Diving into Change with Kindergarten!

When I was in school, I remember knowing exactly what art project was going to come next, because my art teacher did the same art projects year, after year, after year. I told myself I would never be that art teacher.  Yet, as I have been working with Kindergarten this year, I realized I'm becoming that art teacher!

Now, let me explain... our Kindergarten has an awesome theme and play based curriculum called Tools of the Mind.  The students go through themes such as outer space, the amazon, Egypt, and so on.  It's amazing because I now have projects which I can create based on the topics in their classroom.  So we have made our own mummies, created an amazon animal collage, designed our own aliens, and now, are diving under the sea.  So I wondered (literally 20 minutes before the energetic class walked into my room)... "How can I change this up instead of doing my same old underwater landscape lesson?"

Frantically looking around the room, I glanced at the free samples of crayola model magic, counted them, and had just enough!  I knew how much my students love talking about the animals, so decided we were going to create ourselves as ocean animals.  I read students the story "The Magic School Bus on the Ocean Floor" by Joanna Cole and Bruce Degen.  While reading the story I asked students to carefully observe the animals they saw, the lines, patterns, details, colors, etc.  After the story I asked them to close their eyes and imagine they were an animal in the deep sea.  I sent them to work, having discussed 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional pieces of art, and asking them to show me what they would look like if they lived in the ocean.

Check out some of our results!

Students took this project to such a range of levels!  Here, you can see an electric eel, a jelly fish, a squid, a ocean snake, and even a piece of coral!  Upon prompting a student to explain her coral creation by saying" Hmmm, but I thought we were supposed to be making ocean animals..." she informed me that actually, coral is not a plant, but very tiny animals.  I have to admit, I checked it out on google quickly and she was right!

Confession:  This project was in no way smooth sailing as it may appear to have been.  There was the dreadful sound of bead containers spilling onto the floor, the frustration for students with this new 3-dimensional concept and making their creatures stand, and even a few tears from some friends who just kept starting over and over again and therefore hadn't completed the project when our 45 minutes was over.  The important underlying gain from this lesson, was the overall experience and challenge of working with clay, to take a 2-dimensional idea and turn it into a 3-dimensional reality.