Dino Fossil Paintings

I found this idea online recently and I cannot find it again to give my props! If it is a lesson you recently posted, please leave me a comment so I can post a link, and thanks for your idea! ***update - here it is from A Faithful Attempt: http://afaithfulattempt.blogspot.com/2014/03/dinosaur-fossils.html

I do a prehistoric unit with my kindergarteners each year, and we usually do clay fossils, but it seems I under-ordered my clay this year... oops... but it's ok because we did a similar clay thing earlier this year. So when I saw this, I thought it would fill that spot perfectly!

We began by looking at many dino illustrations and breaking them down into simplified shapes. Next, we chose the one we liked best and drew it large and added bones inside - we had fun using our imaginations with this part! We used Dino texture boards from Roylco to make more fossil rubbings in the negative spaces and colored the bones with white crayon before brushing over the whole thing with brown watercolor, revealing white bones popping up from earthy tones. The resist technique is always like magic in elementary school. 

I think they are fantastic!

Early finishers had an opportunity to do some nature drawing in the garden on a beautiful spring day, just before the cold snap returned...

Epic Prehistoric Unit!

Kindergarteners are finishing up an in-depth unit on art from long, long ago - Prehistoric times! We made cave drawings, studied Stonehenge, imagined a dinosaur landscape, and built fossils. Clay fossils are fun to make by pressing dino toys and bones, plants, and shells into clay slabs, then covering them with "mud" paint and rinsing it away to create the look of a fossil that has been buried for thousands of years.

Stonehenge is a very early example of post-and-lintel architecture. We researched the history of this 5,000 year old architectural site and drew from observation of photos. We created a landscape with a horizon line, a view of the sun, and diminishing size.

Next, we drew more landscapes, this time from our imaginations - what would a landscape look like during the days of the dinosaur? From scientific illustrations, we discovered that they liked wet, warm climates with lots of plant life.

These two are well-accessorized - jewelry, lashes, lips!

Finally, we examined the caves at Lascaux using this super cool virtual tour website. (Thanks for sharing this info, Art of Ed) We drew cave art using portrait sets of oil pastels, which are the perfect colors for clay, mud and ash - the tools of choice for cave painters.

Art from other times and places...

It's my favorite time of year in the classroom - time to start our multicultural units!
Don't get me wrong, we study art history all year long from lesson to lesson, but these units are in depth studies of a specific culture or era, involving a number of different activities. It is exciting to think that by the time students leave Dolvin as a middle schooler, they have had art history experience that truly crosses the world and thousands of years.
Here is the list of topics by grade level and as seen on our world map - check back soon to see our progress!
K - Prehistoric art
1 - African art
2 - Asian art
3 - Art of Ancient civilizations
4 - Mexican art
5 - Medieval/Renaissance

Here's a sneak peek... which culture are these students learning about?





Finishing up our prehistoric unit

Kindergarteners are finished with the last 2 projects of our prehistoric art unit, clay fossils and cave paintings. This is a really fun unit - we do a lot of imagining!

This little girl was laughing at the "rain" sound made by all the kids crumbling their paper - so cute!

                                                      

Fun first steps for making fossils

A kindergarten tradition in my art room for many years...

Warm and Cool Dino silhouettes, Kindergarten

Each year, my kindergarten classes learn about art from prehistoric times. We imagined what it would have been like to live in the days of the dinosaur, and how artists would have created landscapes - it was fun to imagine together what the world may have looked like during these early days. I added a new lesson to the unit this year after admiring a similar project over at That Artist Woman blog.  I love the dino silhouettes against the colorful backgrounds, and I made a few changes to the lesson to make it a good fit for my kindergarteners, such as using chalk pastel.  We started by adding chalk pastel stripes to our construction paper - one piece with warm and the other cool.  I wish my camera wasn't a "dinosaur" and could catch the glowing beauty of the blended chalk.  We cut a sun and some reflections from the warm piece, with the cool background representing sky and water.

Next, we cut a large and small palm tree from a black sheet after discussing what type of environment dinosaurs liked.  We also cut a large and small dinosaur and placed them on the page to show depth of space.  Students drew their own dinos, and cutting them was quite a challenge, but I really like the personality they have when free drawn. I am not against the use of templates (a real hot button issue in certain circles : ) ), and I know the cutting would have been much easier if we had used them, but I just thought we'd give it a shot and I think they turned out really fun and cute.  My kindergarteners are pretty advanced this year, I must say. We did look at a few step-by-step "how to draw" sheets to help us choose which shapes to combine to make the dinosaurs we liked best. I think this lesson is a keeper!



a poster I salvaged from a giveaway pile, eons ago : )