Eric Carle Crickets

The first time I did this project was in Appleton with the lovely Sara Wilda, my cooperating teacher from student teaching.  It went so well then that I decided to try it again in Peshtigo.  I read the book The Very Quiet Cricket by Eric Carle to my second grade classes and told them how Eric Carle made all the pictures in his book and that we were going to make our own crickets in the same way.  We started by painting a 12"x18" piece of white paper with four different color paints.  I told them that we can be messy artists and that our brush strokes don't need to go the same directions.  I provided a few different tools and scraps for them to scrap and drag through the paint. 

In class 2 we made our backgrounds to which our crickets would be glued on to.  I mixed up some liquid watercolors and put them into big spray bottles.  I called back one table at a time to the "Spray Station" where students got to spray paint another 12"x18" paper.  Students who were not spray painting were using tracers I made out to lay out the different body parts and legs of the cricket out on the back of their first painted paper.

Class 3 found us cutting out our cricket body parts and gluing them on to our spray painted backgrounds one piece at a time.  This part got very tricky, especially with the first class I did it with.  I had the students gather round my demonstration table and I showed them how to glue up the crickets...this worked but only for a few students.  The rest all forgot what went where by the time they made it back to their tables haha.  I quickly learned that this would have to be a step by step process with the whole class working on the same piece at the same time.  This worked much better.

I used class 4 to show students how to add eyes and antennas using oil pastels.  We also used some scrap paper to add grass, leaves, and other interesting things to our scene.  They students had a great time making these and they looked great hanging in the hallways.