3rd Grade: Dinosaur Fossils
I saw this neat project at A Faithful Attempt:
Students love dinosaurs and I thought this would be a great project to study organic lines more in depth.
I showed a video about Paleontology. Students learned various ways Paleontologists dig for dinosaur fossils. We also explored various kinds of dinosaurs (what they ate and dino habits).
To begin this project, I did a loose step-by-step of a dinosaur fossil. I put a lot of emphasis on organic /curvilinear lines. As long as there were no "straight/linear" lines, student drawings looked quite authentic! Students drew a head, spine, tail, and added ribs, arms, leg bones. Students drew with pencils on 12" x 18" 80 lb white paper. Students traced with black permanent markers. Then, fossils were filled in with white oil pastel. This step was super important. I encouraged students to not miss fossils when adding the pastel, otherwise these fossils do not show up later.
Last step, was brushing brown liquid watercolor paint over the fossil. After brown was brushed on, students had the option of adding black liquid watercolor over the brown. Students could brush on a little black or a bit more. The results were quite varied. Thee art was really wet after brushing on this amount of paint..so I told students to not move the art until they dried a bit. And then, I was the one to carefully move the art to the dry rack. Once dried, they were pretty sturdy again.
On A Faithful Attempt blog, she uses brown tempera. I did try this, but found getting the right consistency (by adding some water) was really challenging. Liquid watercolor worked really well for us. But I'm biased towards watercolor a bit anyway!
I think these came out fantastic! I love how the paint application gives even the paper a "prehistoric" look.
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