Polar Bear Watercolors & Winter Acrostic Poetry

We went TOTALLY Polar last week and did some Polar Bear Watercolors. I found this neat link to a teacher who teaches art in an elementary school. She had a beautiful website that I just loved. So since I have a document camera in my class I can shoot anything from my computer up on the wall,  pull-down screen. So I showed the kids some of her finished products with 1st and 2nd graders and showed them how she only used a few colors to do a fabulous evening snowy scene in an arctic habitat. (This would have looked a lot better on watercolor paper but I'm saving mine for the spring to do flowers on a picket fence, the paper is so expensive I can't get a class set for every project!)

I love this one, this little guy is only 5! Cute Polar Bear Watercolors

The link for her wonderful work is HERE. It is called That Artist Woman.  She is very talented.  Anyway I scrolled up and down and we looked at how she did it.  Then I gave the kids 2 pieces of regular white construction paper 9 x 11 and we just dove right in.  I sprayed their papers with a spray bottle to get them kind of moist. Then I went around spraying their watercolors and gave each pair of kids a paper cup of water and a paper towel to share and paintbrushes. And we just started with blue at the bottom and made a "hill" for the animals to roam around. Then we added a little orange and yellow for sunset. Some of the kids added a little red too. Very watery I told them, very see through. Then we finished with purple across the top, like a real purply sunset.  The one thing we did was I cut them all out a moon circle to lay over their work before they began. I think next time I would put a little piece of tape under it because for most of them it moved around too much and they lost the moon image.  I shoulda thought of that!


Winter Watercolor Scenes and Acrostic Poetry

Then I found a clip art page of arctic animals outlines of a polar bear, snowy owl, snowshoe hare, hedgehog, etc. When their polar bear watercolors dried, or while they dried we cut out the shapes they decided to use in their snow scenes.  My only direction really was just choose no more than 3 per picture.  Then when their pictures were dried we glued on the animals we chose onto the 2 pictures.   I told them that I would put one, their favorite, up on the outside bulletin board. The other one could go home. The papers start to curl up when they dry so I had them put their fat, heavy literature books on them while we went to recess.  So here is our finished products. They turned out pretty, I think.

Winter Acrostic Poetry

Polar Bear Watercolors

The acrostic poems we did are all about winter. We brainstormed winter words for W...then I....N....etc and put them all across the front whiteboard.  I couldn't believe how good they were in coming up with creative words!  Well, except one of them came up with Elephant for the E.  I said, "Now when have you seen an elephant walking around in the winter in Utah...hmmm?" They thought that was funny and we all laughed. So we nixed that word.

Winter Acrostic Poetry

Then they had to use the word in a sentence or phrase on each line.  We did them on sloppy-copy, lined   paper first, then I edited them for spelling, then we rewrote them on the nice white final-copy paper. We
colored the little doo dads on the side with crayon.  And I backed them with blue or purple paper for a border.  We read some winter books about polar bears, Hedgie the Hedgehog, The Mitten (which names lots of winter animals)  while they finished their cutting and pasting. It was a fun afternoon.
Don't you wish you had my job?  Teaching is the best job on earth.