Pop-up Pets

The 2nd and 3rd grade finished their day of drawing pets with the Pet Project.  For their drawing session, they were asked to draw their animal and then write down facts that they could see from the observation.  It was fun to see what they wrote about.

This last week I asked students to make their artwork into a pop-up card.  I called them Pop-up Pets.  The third grade learned how to do pop up cards in 2nd grade and were over the top excited to show me their now more advanced skills.  Many, many kids told me about how they have created cards over the past year.   As always, this skill was magic to my 2nd graders.  If you don't do pop-up cards with your students, consider it.  It can be a jumping off point for so many projects and concepts.

I have a video that I made last year.  It cracks me up because you can hear the excitement in the kids I was teaching at the time.  Go to around the 3-minute mark on the tutorial shown in this previous post. I promise you will smile (and understand why I love my job). 

Here is an example of some 'facts' that the students wrote.  I explained that they should make the spaces interesting for the design of their card.  They wouldn't want to write all of their ideas in a paragraph, but rather small bits here and there that can be cut out of the paper.

It was hard to pick which cards to show you so I chose to show you a couple of many of the animals. Above I have the tarantula named Suzie. I show both to explain how some students chose to 'bubble cut' the details as you see in the above picture on the left.  Others really cut around each little detail.  I think the card on the right looks like Suzie is actually running across the card. Both are wonderful examples.

The three above are cards that created not only the facts of the animal but also the habitat.  As you can see, the bearded dragon had a heat lamp.  The hermit crabs lived in a coconut, and the hamster had a lot of fun tubes and toys (and I think one of the facts about the hamster is that she is 'so cute'). Again, how can you not smile at that? 

This little creative kid made his frog sitting on his card.  It was one of those celebrated accidents.

A couple more of Via, the hamsters. I show you both of these because I encouraged kids to make their animal BIG!  I think that is the number one challenge in drawing for kids... going big.  Here is the same hamster by two artists and you can see... big was hard for the one on the right. 

I loved the details for the Bearded Dragons above.  You can see a lot of detail was put into these two drawings and they really used the full space. I also like the contrast of facts in circles and facts in squares.  Not a huge difference, but a conscious aesthetic choice. 

Reflection on this project was in two forms.  Some students had time to journal about their project.  You can see the above.  With this journal I'm working on reflection and presentation encouraged by our National Art standards. Below I have a picture of a Gallery Walk.  If you are not using Gallery Walks in your classroom all the time, consider it.  Here is a Do's and Don't's video of Gallery Walks.