Character Birds

Description: For this project, we first took a note card and wrote down an idea of the character/description for our bird. We named the bird and wrote something about what they are like, look like, and like to do. Once we were done with this, we cut out the already printed layout of our birds body, wings, and tail. We then took crayons or markers, tissue paper, and feathers and decorated our birds body. Making sure to include some time of textural and visual pattern for the bird. Once we were done decorated our bird, we took glue sticks and glued the two pieces of the body together and then glued the wings and tail on. We then punched three holes into our birds body, one hole on each wing and one on the top of the body in a straight line. Once the holes were punched, we tied a piece of yarn through each hole and then tied all three pieces together at the top.

Extension Activity: If you take the ideas behind designing a character and creating your own design for your bird, you can apply it to any animal lesson. You can do something like this if you are doing a lesson on tigers, bears, lions, sharks, or any other animal group. It really lets the students express themselves through a fun project. You could also take this concept and apply it to some group in the plant kingdom, like flowers or trees. The nice thing is you do not have to do just flying animals to make this a fun project for the students. 

Clay Necklace

Description- For this project, we took a section of clay and kneaded the clay to make sure there were no air bubbles. We then took pieces of clay and rolled or formed them around a wooden tool to make the shape of bead that we wanted on your necklace. Forming the clay around the tool allowed us to have a hole to place the piece of yarn through. Once the beads were hardened, we took different colors of tempre paint and painted a design onto the beads. We used the colors of blue, green, yellow, red, white, and black. Once the beads were dry, we placed them in the order we wanted on the piece of yarn and then tied the ends of the yarn together.

Extension Activity: If you are teaching a lesson on social behaviors like respect, friendship, or something along those lines in another subject, you can have the students make either two friendship braclets or some respectful, nice, or friendship based bracelet. You can then have them give it to a classmate as a nice gesture while they keep the other one. You would need to draw names for each student before hand so they do not all choose the same person or pair up and make one for each other. However, with this activity it can really help them be more aware of classmates they may not normally socialize with and it can also teach them the idea of being nice to everyone no matter what.