1 project - 3 ways

A while back I posted about trying to get more variety in my projects.  Today we are finishing up another "attempt" of mine to do this.  5th grade just finished their cityscape unit.  We started by reading Robert Neubeckers book "Wow! City!"

photo courtesy of Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast

  We discussed what Izzy must have seen, smelled, heard and felt when exploring the big city.  We then talked about what we think of when we think of a big city.  For my first classes we created city drawings using sharpies, crayola markers and water.  They drew their "big city" buildings with sharpie and then outlined them with crayola markers.  To finish the images, they added water to the markers and surprise. 

For my second classes they painted a sky on their paper (at sky painting stations) and then "built" buildings out of magazine images.

For my final classes they drew 2 pages of buildings.  One was for faraway buildings that didn't have much detail and would be painted with watercolor.  They other was for close up buildings that were filled with details and colored with markers.  To finish they cut out and layered their images onto their sky.... sky, watercolor buildings and then marker buildings.  We did all this drawing on old newspapers. 

I am sure glad I went to the extra work of doing this... I love that I have 3 different entries for the art show even though I only taught one lesson.  It was also fun to hear the kids "teaching" the other classes about what their class did.