Wednesday, October 21, 2015

2nd Grade: Leaves and Ripples

Second grade took some time to carefully study leaves. We did some observation drawing to capture the rips, tears, spots, and colors that help make each leaf unique. Students started in pencil then switched to crayon to sealing in their marks with wax. (My rule was no tracing!)

Next, we studied what would happen if our leaves fell into a puddle. Ripples, of course! The students discovered that ripples started around each leaf then grew into the other ripples as they went outwards. 

Our ripple lines were created by using water-soluble markers. We used expo overhead markers, but crayola washable markers would work just fine. Carefully, we circled around each leaf in turn until we could not get our marker through without crossing over another line; when that happened we treated it as a single item and traced around both objects. 

After tracing we 'painted' over our marker lines with water. The water caused the markers to bleed giving the appearance depth with in artwork. Some were worried about the water destroying their leaf drawings, but the wax in the crayons helped to keep their leaf marks safe.

Lastly, we added white painted lines following along with our ripples lines to give the illusion of light reflecting off the water and back into our eyes.

Students had great predictions about ripples, and how water and wax would react with one another. They proved to be real scientist as they experimented to test their theories to find out the answers to their questions. 


No comments:

Post a Comment