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Action
Projects ~ Murals
SUMMARY: Students
design and create a class mural that demonstrates their
ecological knowledge. DURATION: 1 to 2 weeks GRADES: 2nd-5th
ACTION
COMPONENT |
| In
this age of astonishing environmental degradation, it
is important that our children, friends, families and
neighbors
be
increasingly environmentally
aware. Our students can help by sharing their experiences
and knowledge about nature with others. |
STANDARDS |
| This
project supports many life science standards and writing
standards. You could also align the artistic aspects
of the project with state visual arts standards. |
SUGGESTIONS |
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Orientation: Explain to your class that it will be making a huge mural of Hidden Villa to share with others. On the mural, students will represent what they learned about themselves and the environment. Brainstorm
with your class all the areas of Hidden Villa that
they explored. Remind them to be specific. For example,
even in the confines of the garden there are several
different areas that provide students with different
experiential and learning opportunities. On the farm
there are many different animal enclosures. In the
forest there are many different trails. Assign or
support your students in choosing the area that
they
would like to represent. Individual
or Pairs: Guide
your students in writing a short paragraph about
their assigned area at Hidden Villa. Their paragraphs
could include an explanation of a fun or interesting
experience they had in this area along with the specific
information they learned. Students should revise
and edit their paragraphs when they are done. |
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Each student (or pair of students)
creates the artistic representation of their
area at Hidden Villa separately and then glues them
together on the mural. In this way all students can
be working on the project at once. Orientation: Before
your students begin, make sure to define how big their
illustration should be. Then model and teach how to
implement the artistic technique you would like your
students to use. (I prefer to push my students' artistic
ability and shy away from letting them use markers.
For our class murals we have used student-made stencils,
Eric Carle style collage and watercolor.) Activity: Working
with other students who have written about their area,
students work on their artistic representation.
(I recommend requiring a rough draft sketch
before students start in on their final illustration. ) |
Option
A
(Putting Things Together)
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Assemble your class mural on large,
taped-together pieces of colored butcher paper.
Review the concept of scale with your class. "Where
should each area go on the mural so that your 'mini-mural map'
makes sense to the people who look at it?" Together
with the class you could lightly trace
in pencil the location of each major area. Activity: Invite
a few students or groups of students to come up
one at a time to glue their paragraphs and artistic
expressions of their area in the correct location
on the mural.
Finally: Organize a
rotation of students to draw in the background
or simply assign a few students this task. Display.
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Follow
the same steps as above, but make a mural that supports
the environmental learning from your integrated
Hidden Villa unit(s). For example, your class could
create a mural of your community that indicates the
location of the possible generation of environmental
pollution (e.g.: Storm drains, factory smoke stacks,
playground trash, cars on the street, etc.). This
same mural could also locate the different places
where
citizens
could
make better
environmental decisions to protect the environment
(ex: bicycles on the street instead of cars, recycling
bins in our classrooms, compost piles in our backyards,
etc.). |
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