Australia

Several grade levels have been learning about the art and animals of Australia. So I decided to post all the projects at once. First off is my Kindergartners. They learned about the Koala Bear. We talked about how a Koala is not a bear at all it's a marsupial, how they eat eucalyptus leaves and sleep 20 hours a day! This project practices cutting, gluing and painting skills. First we cut two long strips of brown paper off of one piece, the strips were used for branches and the big piece was the tree trunk. Next we cut out some leaves. Finally it was time to paint. This lesson is a good intro to paint because we only use one color and we use only one finger to paint with. No brushes to clean! Once they are dry we draw the face on with black marker and add fluff with white crayons. The second week there is usually some extra time so I show them the part of this video about koalas. (The Koalas are at 32:36 in the video)

Fourth Grade learned about the Aboriginal art of Australia known as dot art and handprint art.  We talked about why ancient Aboriginal people would leave their handprints on trees and rock walls. We learned that these were markings to show who had been where and the importance of those people. Next I told them an Aboriginal story called the Rainbow Serpent. This story is about how all the plants and animals appeared in Australia. So for the first class period I had students trace his/her hand on Kraft paper (brown bags work well too) and draw a snake slithering around the arm. They had the rest of the class time to decorate the hand with other Aboriginal symbols and designs with markers.
The next class period I showed this video. It's around two minutes and looks at real Aboriginal artists creating handprint and dot art. Afterwards we decorated around our handprints with dots. A lot of people use q-tips, but the stick end of a paintbrush works just as well.

Finally Second Grade learned a bit of both Australian art and Australian animals. The first week we learned about dot art and watched the video the fourth graders watched. We talked about why they used certain colors and shapes in dot painting. To begin they were also given Kraft Butcher paper and circle tracers (lids, bottles...) and traced different size circles on the paper. After that they decorated these circles with dot style painting. The next week we looked at a popular Australian animal, the crocodile. We learned the difference between an alligator and a croc and some other cool facts. Then we drew out our crocodiles on green construction paper, cut them out and glued them onto our dot painting background.