What If I Had Animal Teeth Art Activity

When one of the teachers that I go in for regularly asks me to plan an art lesson I normally do not hesitate to do so (dare I say it's my favourite subject?). Anyways, that's what happened when I was going to be in a grade 3/4 classroom a little while ago. To find an art project I went to my favourite blog for art ideas which is A Faithful Attempt and found this lesson:

If I had Animal Teeth 

I'm a sucker for an art project that also involves writing (you can see how I've incorporated poetry into my art classes here and here) and I felt that I was given enough time in the morning for the class to use their iPads to do some research on animal teeth with a partner and then write about those animal teeth. 

I gave them about an hour to do the research and the writing part of this activity (I also gave them the sentence starter "If I could have animal teeth I would want ______ because _____________" and encouraged them to come up with at least 3 reasons as to why they would want that particular animals teeth and one fact about that animals teeth. Since they had the iPads now and might not later in the day I also had them do some rough sketches of their animal teeth so that they wouldn't forget what they look like. If they finished early they could read/write/draw (which was just something that the teacher had in the lesson plan a couple of times throughout the day).

Later on we did the actual art project.

Before I got to school that day I had cut out templates of the mouth and tongue just in case students couldn't figure out how to draw them (I did give them the option to use my template which would look similar to the example of to make their own).

But, before starting the art project we went over some expectations.

The nice thing about using A Faithful Attempt's blog is that she always posts lots of student examples! So before starting any project that I get the idea from off her site I always show kids all the examples. While I'm showing them the examples we do a bit of critiquing and talk about what we liked (and did not like) about them. Based off of what we come up with I create a list of expectations for their art. For this particular project we decided that it needed to fill up the page, that the person had to be a fairly accurate representation of them (I told them their teacher should be able to come back the following day and decide who's is who's just based off of how it looks, and the animal teeth also need to be an accurate representation of the animal they chose (which is why we sketched the teeth earlier when they were doing their research).

Then I explained the process of creating the head (start with the head shape, sketch and cut out the mouth, tongue, teeth, and hair, glue everything together, and then draw on some eyes and a nose). Once that's all done they chose another colour of consruction paper and glued their head on to it.

And voila! They were done!

Here are some examples of what my grade 3/4 class came up with:

I just had them leave their writing in their writing books and left it as an option for the teacher to add later if he wanted (although we really didn't leave space for any writing with how we put them up).

Thanks A Faithful Attempt for the great art activity!