Hidden Safari

For this project, we chose an animal that lives in the safari. I chose a zebra. We then had to turn the picture of the animal we chose upside down. Once we had the picture turned upside down, we took a sky blue colored pencil and drew a picture of the animal that was also upside down. Once we had the picture completed, we turned both pictures right side up to see if they were almost identical. Once we had completed this step, we took Orange, Red, and Yellow colored pencils or crayons and drew patterns using shapes or other patterns to create a camouflage over the animal we drew. I chose to do orange triangles, red circles- both ones that were not filled in and ones that were filled in, and yellow swirls to help create a camouflage over my zebra. Once we were completely done creating our camouflage, we had someone look at it our picture to make sure you could not tell what the animal was. Once we were done with this, we glued our picture onto a piece of 9 x 12 sheet of construction paper and then wrote three clues as to what our safari animal is.

Before we started the designing our project, we made a set of red classes that we could use to check and see if our animal is able to be seen clearly. We took a piece of read construction paper and used a traceable patter to cut a whole where the eye and nose pieces are. We then took a piece of cellophone and either taped or stapled it to the back of our construction paper. We used these classes to help check our progress during the camouflaging stage of our project.

Extension Activity: You could use this same concept of drawing a picture and then camouflaging it with a pattern for other subjects or units as well. You could do this for a unit on water animals, desert animals, Native American Animals, or about any other unit you can come up with. You can also have the students draw more detail into the subject instead of just the animal and then do the camouflage over top.