Colorful Chameleons

I love this project and so do the students. They love looking and learning about chameleons and are really inspired when they start drawing. This leaves me with a bunch of beautiful, unique chameleons, which makes my job of choosing which ones for the hallway quiet a challenge. 

We start this project off by looking at different pictures of chameleons. Students and I talk about what qualities make the chameleon look so different from other lizards. They point out his curly tail, his crest on his head and his big eyes. Afterwards I pass out black paper and students draw their chameleon with a pencil, nice and large! 

After I demo how to trace the pencil drawing with Elmer's glue. Once the glue dries it looks pretty cool and it forces the students to not color over their outlines with the oil pastels. This is also a good way to see which students have a good handle on using the glue. If there is time at the end of class I like to show a clip from David Attenborough's Life in Cold Blood about chameleons.( I do not show the part of the video where the chameleon is having babies. . . you know why.) 

The next week we talk about using oil pastels and I demo how to blend them and get nice solid colors. We also look at a few pictures of panther chameleons, they are quite colorful. Then students begin coloring. I like to have them leave the background black as it really makes the chameleon pop off the page. Once again if there is time and most students are finished I like to show this clip of a strange little chameleon known as the namaqua chameleon. The students really get a kick out of this strange little guy.