Day 4: Dinosaur Eggs, Nests, & Cyanotypes

Like previous days, I put our list of classroom expectations on the board with (Keep making art when you are done!) underlined. I also put up a schedule for the day on the board.

There were a lot of moving parts for this lesson and I wanted to make sure we all knew what was going to happen and when.

First, a visual PowerPoint with information about dinosaur eggs, nests, and prehistoric plants we still have today. The students also learned about contemporary artists who make fake plants out of recycled material. We also discussed the history of photography and Anna Atkins, possibly the first female photographer, and her cyanotypes of plants.

Next, it was important for the kids to paint all the construction paper we were going to be using for our leaves. Could we have just used colored construction paper? Yes, but it wouldn’t have been as visually interesting.

We broke out the paint and the brushes, and after the students picked a plant they wanted to create, they began painting construction paper in the greens, yellows, blues, and pinks they needed. After finding out that magnolias had been around during the time of the dinosaurs, all the girls in the class opted to make a magnolia tree.

We left all the paper to dry in the classroom now and moved our classroom outside to create our own cyanotypes. The students used tape to mask their watercolor paper and to tape down plants, then spray paint to create their cyanotypes. Spray paint was a huge hit with this group of 2-4^th graders and they created some truly awesome cyanotypes.

When we moved back in, our painted papers were still drying, which was fine, because we still needed to make our dinosaur eggs!

So we mixed our dinosaur egg batter as a class (coffee grounds, flour, water, and salt) and each student selected 4 toy dinosaur figurines as their baby dinosaurs. Then outside we went again to mold our eggs.

At which point the class was nearly over. We still needed to make our paper plants, but this was deferred until the next day.

This lesson went really well. I feel most comfortable and the students seem the most productive when there is a lot going on. We were moving pretty fast, but each activity was engaging enough that it wasn’t overwhelming.

This is probably the last day that I did a formal, paper exit survey. I found that no matter how I varied the questions, I wasn’t getting much information out of the students from them.