Dragonflies: Half Scientist/ Half Artist

This project was another that I borrowed from the wonderful Sara Wilda :)  I made a little slide show and gathered some very interesting information about Dragonflies and discussed it with my fifth grade classes.  I was worried that maybe they would not be interested in my random dragon fly factoids but once again found that as long as I was enthusiastic about it and brought it up in a fun and cool way, they loved it.  The students, and mine as well, favorite fact about dragonflies is how they are viewed and respected in the Japanese culture.  Children their capture dragonflies by tying one of their long, thin, black hairs to a small pebble and tossing it up into the air in a field with many dragonflies.  Dragonflies instinctively go after the tiny pebble resembling their prey and get tangled in the hair and fall to the ground.  Very cool.

After discussing Dragonflies and their meanings in different cultures, I told the students that for this project we were going to be 1/2 scientists and 1/2 artists.  The scientist side comes from studying the dragonfly and all of its body parts.  I printed out pictures of all kinds of different species for students to look at and I demonstrated on the white board how to divide up our papers to create a grid for the body and wings.  We talked about the head, abdomen, and thorax and how to make each part proportional to the other.

In the next class, the students entered artist mode.  I explained and demonstrated how now that we had our dragonfly drawn accurately and realistically, we are able to add some creativity and imagination by designing the rest or our dragonflies with some wild lines and style.  After drawing and designing there dragonfly with pencil, we traced over it with a fine point sharpie.

Once all the sharpie work was done, it was time to add some crazy colors.  I put out 10 different colors of liquid watercolor and allowed the students to move around the room and paint with as many colors as they wanted.  After the painting was done and the paper was dried we cut out the dragonflies and made a windy sky background paper with some white chalk and glued on our dragonflies.

Fun project and the students really did a great job.