2nd Grade Arctic Habitat

Arctic Habitat Action Page

This is my own version of our Arctic Habitat page.  I will post more pictures of the children's work as they finish working on their pages.

The idea for this page in our art journal came from Kendra Embleton, a 2nd grade teacher here at East. She had watched a video showing how the polar bear could smell seals even through very thick ice and it showed the polar bear hunting for seals.  Her idea was to put the polar bear on a brad so that the bear could move up and down, as if banging on the ice. The little seals are attached with velcro so the students can detach them and play with them.

The teachers showed their students the video from BBC, Polar Bear Battlefield, at the following link before they came to art class. The whole video is interesting, but the part you want to watch is from 7:30-15:15.  It shows the bear hunting and breaking into the snow and ice to find the seals.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bptu9BMgTzg&feature=related

For our sketchbook activity, I showed the children how to draw a polar bear, but in application, both the polar bear and the seals were preprinted on thick tagboard for each child.

This journal page was pretty simple to make and very fun.  We put a puddle of thick white tempera (Crayola brand is my favorite) right on the pages and the children spread the thick paint around with a large brush.  Then we went around and gave each child some silver glitter paint to add some sparkle. They just mixed this in with the white.  Finally, the children used watercolor paints (the cake type) to add soft color and shadow to the ice.   While this paint was drying, they  painted their seals and their polar bear.  Then we worked on our Habitat Wheel!   The habitat wheel as a mini-version of our zentangle art from last year.  I will post a photo of this  in a separate blog post!

In many ways, this was the most age appropriate journal page for the 2nd graders.  It was simple and easy for every child to have success.

As a note, all of these journal pages can also be created on regular paper.