Macaw Collaborative Project: Endangered Animal Study

Every year, I choose a new theme for my art show.  This year's theme was the Art of Asia.  I have begun thinking about next year, and the theme I selected was Endangered Animals.  This will tie in nicely with my school's increased arts integration program.  Part of the reason I choose this theme was because I wanted students to be more aware of the decision that they make and how those decision effect our environment.

So to kick off the them for next year, I told my younger grades that we were going to make a giant scarlet macaw entirely out of recycled materials.  The older grades (3 to 5) were making paintings of scarlet macaws to kick off the new theme, so this related nicely.

After a brief history of the macaw and the amazon rainforest, I made the connection with the students that recycling paper means that less trees are cut down in the rainforest.  Now I know that is over-simplifying a complicated issue, but after a discussion, they saw how the two were related.

So, to begin this project, I showed the class how I drew a large macaw (started with basic shapes.  I did not intend on drawing the entire thing in front of my kindergarten class, but they were mesmerized by watching it, so I did!  Then I got out our scrap paper bin.  Every time a student uses a piece of construction paper, any left-overs are put into these bins.  They come in wonderfully helpful for many things throughout the year: collages, free draw crafts, paper sculpture, fixing mistakes by covering up.

The students love looking through the scrap paper bins.  I talked to my students about all of the colors that we would need to make our macaw (I know there is no purple in the scarlet macaw, but I added it for our rainbow effect).  The students cut papers into football shapes, ovals or teardrops, making sure the shapes were larger than their thumb.  Then, the students sorted the paper into different bins by color.

As the students were cutting and sorting, I began gluing the colors onto the bird.  I called one table over at a time (4 students) to select the next feather to get glued and where they wanted it.

My second grade classes were also involved in this process.  They were given the scrap drawing paper (everything left over from weird cutting sizes) to create painted paper.  They selected colors that were neighbors and I talked about analogous colors.  These papers were then cut into feathers by the first grade classes.  It was really neat how all of the younger grades contributed to this project!  I will post the finished project as soon as it is complete!