Dinosaurs Love Underpants!

This is a fun little project that I did with my first grade classes.  If you have never read the book Dinosaurs Love Underpants, you need to because it is awesome.  I read the book to my students and of course, every time you say the word "underpants" to a first grader you are going to get major laughs so it was very fun and entertaining.  It was like Christmas came early for these classes because not only were they going to make dinosaurs, but they were also going to make them wear funny underpants. 

I wasn't sure if I should let them go off and try drawing any old dinosaur they wanted to because most of the time when you do that without instruction you will get a dinosaur about the size of a peanut in the middle of the page and we needed these to be BIG so we could make them BIG underpants.  I told them that if they were comfortable drawing a dinosaur and felt like a pro, they could create their own as long as they made it touch both sides of the page.  The rest of the class could watch me draw three different types of dinos up  on the board as a step by step demo.  After drawing with pencil, we colored them with crayon and added white clouds in the sky, trees, volcanoes, lava, and other dinosaurs in the background.  Used watercolors to create a resist to paint the sky and the ground. 

To make the underwear, I gave each student tracing paper and showed them how to trace over the rear end of their dino where they wanted to place their underpants.  After tracing, I stapled their tracing paper to a decorative sheet that they chose and had them cut it out.  The decorative underpants then fell free from their tracing and were a perfect fit for their dino.  They glued on the underpants and did giggled like crazy.