Panda Bears: Kindergarten

This year's art show theme is "The Art of Asia."  Every grade level has studied and created a piece of art based off of a country in Asia.  In Kindergarten, we studied China, specifically the panda bear.  We learned that they are endangered, that their natural habitat are the mountains of china, and that they eat bamboo.  I have a piece of bamboo in my classroom, and the students were thrilled to hold it!

This is a three day project, I'm pretty sure if it was altered a little it could be shortened to two days though.  On the first day, we studied the panda bear and the country of China.  We then created the bamboo background.  We used a pencil and drew lines and dots straight up the middle of our paper.  I showed them that the bamboo could branch off in a different direction, but it wouldn't happen a whole lot.  After we drew all of our bamboo lines, we painted them with green paint.

On day two, we created the panda bear.  I have a ton of circles in my room!!  I keep them sorted by size and I used the medium and large circles for this project.  The mediums are yogurt lids and the larges are country crook lids.  I like to recycle and reuse whenever possible.  Anyway, we traced our two circles and added all of our details in a guided drawing.  I had the students use a black crayon for the eyes and nose, and then repeat that we were only painting "the ears, the arms and the legs."

On day three, we reviewed all that we had learned about panda bears.  I showed the class a video clip of panda bears playing and climbing trees, too cute!  Then we talked about cutting out something very large and that our goal was to try to not cut off his arms or legs, etc.  I told them that if it happened (which it did) that I could fix it by gluing it back in place at the end.  Then we talked about how picky I am when we cut.  That we are cutting like an artist and that we are trying our hardest to stay on the line.  This is not a race, we want to cut slowly and carefully.  I really think these types of reminders help!  After we cut out our panda, we glued him down by making sure that we put a little bit of glue all around the panda.  If we had time, I gave out strips of green paper and a little piece of green for the students to make a piece of bamboo in his arm.