Every time I do this project, I am a little disappointed with the results.

Students can learn a lot about perspective, texture, color and drawing by selecting a magazine image and attempting to draw the other half. For this project, they had to choose an image that was a half page or full page, and then I used my paper cutter to cut it in half.

They saved the other half with a paper clip clipped to their drawing paper and used a glue stick to attach the main half to their paper. They always have trouble 'finishing' the drawing so that it fills up the page. 

After lightly sketching out the rest of the image and adding other things to fill up the paper, we used colored pencils to color, attempting to match the colors as closely as possible by layering. This colored pencil technique video was very helpful in explaining how to layer color. 

Thank goodness for Art Hub for kids to help me plan the last day or so when only a few classes had a final day of art and needed to make something that they could take home the same day. This how to draw baby groot video, was very fun and cute! It was also perfect because Guardians of the Galaxy just came out and many of my students have already seen it. 

I always encourage my kiddos to sketch lightly in pencil first, and then use a sharpie to outline the good lines they want to keep, and erase old pencil lines. It adds a few minutes to the finished product but I think it is worth the time. We used colored pencils to color and shade. 

While students finished coloring and some added a background, I played a few end of the year videos from my youtube 'end of the year' playlist. I also really like the animation Planets on Vimeo, but I always stop it before the 12th planet as the last song isn't age appropriate, the rest of the video is pretty engaging. 

When my students had finished the big sloth unit at the beginning of the semester, I knew I did not want to jump right into painting. Chalk is so unbelievably messy that I just needed a simple project for a few days to recover. I was telling another specials teacher about my dilemma and she gave a simple suggestion: have them draw a jersey from their favorite team.
​
Hmmmmm. That would be pretty easy....and it would give me a chance to reinforce iPad procedures since kids might need to look up team colors or information.

That could work. So simple. So easy. 

What started out as a one-day thing stretched out for two weeks. Because with me, it can never just be easy...it has to be a full blown unit.....

First, students got a message from flash. Which I read painfully slowly, like a sloth. At first they were incredulous, but then when I mentioned the word JERSEY, they got excited, especially the boys. 

Day one, students practiced their jerseys in their sketchbooks. I printed off simple visual outlines of football, baseball, soccer, and basketball jersey. I ended up adding cheerleading, volleyball, rodeo, track and gymnastics visuals into the mix for kids who needed to be creative about their team sports. 

Once they had drawn the jersey, they used 9X12 white paper to draw their jersey and 6-9 additional symbols from their sport. The symbol could be a football, a player's number or anything else that would work to represent the team---they had to draw a 'grid' to organize their symbols.

Then, everything was outlined in sharpie. Sometimes, I hate letting them use pencil first because they can never seem to erase pencil lines very well. I am very picky about erasing. 

I decided to limit them to crayons for this project in order to have adequate color options. In the future, maybe I will use colored pencils.....

I even went to Wal-Mart to buy a 105 color box of crayons because I only have one sky blue and NO brick red in my entire inventory.....how can you truly match a team's colors without using the right shade of red/blue?! Next year I am definitely ordering multiple crayon color sets.....I don't know how my requisition only sent me the standard 24 colors again this year...I really thought I had ordered the big assortment this year....all well. 

My reasoning behind this project was two-fold, I really wanted to get my sports-minded students excited about the art, and I really wanted to learn a little about their interests. Sometimes if you don't give them a chance to put the Denver Broncos on something, it will end up making its way into their artwork one way or another. The project ended up being a bit of a snooze...and it is not one of my favorites. 

I absolutely love the 'grid' layout that Kathy uses on her projects for kids. For this project, we used a similar format. 

In fact, half way through the FOREVER it took for them to color these babies, I had to take a day off. 

​It was a beautiful Friday at the end of September. I set up a bunch of shoes on the table and after practicing some contour and blind contour with dry erase markers, we went outside to draw in our sketchbooks with felt tip pens. I had them draw their own shoes outside because the weather was so nice AND because I did not want to smell their feet. 

Okay. Seriously. 5th and 6th graders can draw shoes really really well.

​I was amazed at how successful they were!! I ended up setting up a little shoe center in my classroom for those that had finished their jerseys to sit at and draw shoes on white paper. 

In their sketchbooks, I made them draw with the School Smart waterbase ink/fiber pen. 

For some reason, I had ordered several dozen of the 8 color sets. I left out yellow and orange and had red, blue, green purple and brown for students to choose from. This worked out really well....sharpie would've bled through the pages and regular marker wouldn't have had a THIN enough line. Also, since we did not use pencil, they could not erase...which was so magnificent! 

To build their confidence at blind contour without using up a ton of paper, I gave them dry erase markers and dry erase boards. Well technically I only have 20 dry erase board so I had to improvise with some dry erase sleeves. These things are the bomb. Also, I have been saving my lonely socks, you know, the ones from the dryer that have lost their partner. I use those as erasers. Shoes and socks day---OH MY!!

Also, got the idea to suggest adding a crazy sock in their finished drawings from this post. So cute!

Students really enjoyed going outside to draw, even if it was only for a little while. 

With a couple of classes, we even had time to blind contour draw the bike rack!

While searching for one final BIG unit to wrap up the year, I really wanted my 5th and 6th students to focus on texture and detail. The chameleon project was very successful for many of my students. 

I had hidden a bunch of chameleons around my room years ago for a substitute and one day my students pointed them out and asked what they were for. Well, they were just for fun. 

For this unit, I started by gathering books about chameleons from the library. I hung up several pictures of chameleons around the room and I created a packet of visuals with images of chameleons for students to use as reference while practicing in their sketchbooks. 

We started learning about chameleons by looking at this video. Then we practiced drawing chameleons in our sketchbooks. Once we had practiced, it was time to draw the chameleon on white paper. I encouraged students  to crop and enlarge the chameleon. 

After drawing the chameleon on white paper, we used skinny sharpies to draw LOTS of texture. Chameleons are covered in scales so students had to draw the texture. Also, if their chameleon needed to be grasping on to a branch, I encouraged them to draw the branch and outline it with the skinny sharpie. 

Once students had everything outlined, we used colored pencils to color the chameleons. Students could make their chameleons as realistic or wild colored as they wanted. I showed them a video of a time lapse of an iguana drawing as an example of how much time and layering it takes to color something hyper realistic with colored pencils. 

While students were coloring, I pulled them over to a painting station to paint a frame for the project. Students could choose between green, blue, or gray paper. At the painting station, they could use cool colors to make a design around the edges of the paper. 

Now, before getting out the chameleons in order to finish coloring, I explained that first, we were going to use oil pastels to create a background. I explained that if we were taking a photo of a chameleon, and we were using a special lens with our camera, most likely the camera would zoom in on the texture of the chameleon's scales, which would make them really in focus, leaving the background out of focus.

Today, students chose a background color of 8X10 construction paper and used oil pastels to draw and color the background. It could be a dessert, a leafy jungle, or something else, but the important thing is that they do not draw it with pencil first, as the pencil will make it too small to color with oil pastels....they can draw it with chalk first if they are afraid they will mess up. The chalk is erasable. Which makes it nice. 

If anyone did not paint the frame last time, today is the day to paint the frame.  

I saved the chameleons over the summer and used them to make a big back to school display in the cafeteria for open house. 

If students need to color the background with oil pastels, or paint a frame, they need to do that today. Also, if they need colored pencils to finish coloring the chameleon, they can use those to do that. Finally, if they are done with everything else, they are ready to cut out the chameleon and glue it to the background. I brought in my very small detail scrapbooking scissors for students to borrow if they needed them. Once they used a glue stick to glue the chameleon to the background, they used regular white glue to attach it to a matte, and then to the frame we painted a while back. I encouraged them to add details on top of the paint on the frame with oil pastels, but most of them did not do that. 

This year for teacher appreciation week, I came up with a fun-food-themed card. Based on whether the teacher had a sweet tooth (thanks to you we're smart cookies!) or a spicy preference (taco 'bout a great teacher), each student made a card, and I wrapped it up the stack of cards in ribbon, put it with either cookies or a taco spice packet as a surprise for the teacher. This was really fun and the kids did a pretty good job giving their food a face....And as an added bonus, we were working on the taco cards on Cinco de Mayo!

Students glued a strip inside the card and wrote the teacher's name and signed their own name. It was a great chance for them to add a special note or drawing too!

Here is the 'Thanks to You.....We're Smart Cookies' printable.

Here is the 'Taco 'bout a great teacher' printable.

For the cookie cards, students cut the corners of a 4X4 square to make it round. For the taco, we used a 4X6 yellow rectangle and trimmed off only the top two corners. We colored these cards using crayola color sticks, but crayons or markers would've been great too. I liked the color sticks because they were not messy and we had a chance to use 'colored pencils' without all the sharpening!

A few of my older students drew cookies with milk and some even drew a smart looking cookie monster with glasses.

How adorable is this illustration!!? Definitely inspired many of my students' cookies.

How awesome is this cookies and milk shirt from threadless?!

Love this illustration!