Creating Northern Lights/ Aurora Borealis Effects with First Graders

When Mrs. Kavney’s first grade class wanted to make an aurora borealis for their Alaska project I went home and experimented with all sorts of materials to see if I could come up with something reasonable. After many failed attempts I am happy to say that I have a lovely technique to share. By the way, I am doing my best to spell aurora borealis correctly throughout this post, but forgive me if I slip up. The spell check doesn’t get it.

Using a #4 coffee filter and markers

The first step barely hints at how the end product will turn out. I opened up #4 white coffee filters and asked the students to decorate them with bands of colored markers. I provided Crayola Gel markers, because I like their hues, but any water soluble marker will do.

Bands of Color for Aurora Borealis, waiting to become spectacular

You might have noticed the protective shiny paper on the work area.  If I didn’t have this freezer paper around, I would have used waxed paper under the colored paper.

Lightly Dampening

To blend the rough edges of the strokes of the markers, students gave their colored coffee filters a light coat of water, then….

Smooching the colors around

… they slipped their little hands into plastic bags and squeezed and smooched the colors around, to create streaks and blends. This is when the WOW effect began to emerge.

Drying

Our Northern Lights now needed to dry. This took only of couple of hours.

Creating creases

 Students then pinched together a few little folds,to mimic the rays of light streaking down from the heavens.

The added advantage of this step is that  the project took a step away from the original shape of the coffee-filter.

Creased

Light application of white glue to the back of the paper

Notice that we’re still using the freezer paper to protect our work surface. Here, a thin coat of white glue (like Elmer’s Glue) is lightly applied to the BACK of our Northern Lights paper.

Into the Book

Now, the colored, creased, and glued paper is laid, unglued side up, upon the black paper of the final project.   The  glue that strayed on to the black paper virtually disappeared after drying.

Streaks of Glitter Glue

One last touch, which had to dry overnight, was to use tubes of glitter glue to create a bit more drama. I limited each borealis to three or four glitter-glue streaks.

Northern Lights behind the mountains

Students then cut out a silhouette of snowy mountains. Finally we were done with THIS part of the project.

Alaska book with a Tern

Visit my previous post for more of a look at the finished product.

Alaska Books with First Graders!

Three-Panel Alaska Book

It’s been a busy book making season here! Lots of books have been finishing up in the classrooms, and now it’s time to start showing them off. This Alaska triptych (three panel) / folder was a project that particularly caught my fancy. Students had been following the Alaskan Iditarod. Using the Iditarod as a backdrop, the teacher Mrs. Kavney  connected the study of geography, math, science and reading. Continuing with the Alaskan theme, her class work on this book that included a report, tucked into the front pocket, a Haiku, mounted within the book, a pop-up tree, an Alaskan animal, and the aurora borealis in the background.

Swimming Alaskan Sea Otter, attached with paper springs

Each student studied a different animal. I gave the students a choice of cutting out and coloring a drawing that I gave them of their animal or drawing their own. If I had more time with these children I would have liked to have spent a full period helping them to do drawings of their own, but that was one detail that I had to forgo.

Alaskan Polar Bear

Still, the decision to put in a drawing of their own was offered, and I was happy when that was the decision that was made.

Alaskan Haiku

Mrs. Kavney did a Haiku lesson with her students, which was proudly displayed to the right of the Alaskan landscape. The students liked writing the Haiku so much that they asked to do more!

My friend Susan Share told me that the Alaskan landscape is full of tall spruce, so we created spruce trees to put on a pop-up. The star of the project, though, was the colorful northern lights behind the mountains. I will be writing a separate post on how we made these whimsical and colorful additions to the Alaskan night sky.

Alaska book, closed

The folder/pocket on the outside of the books worked out well: the standard 8 1/2″ x 11″ paper tucked neatly inside. See my  post on planning out this book for dimension details.

These books looked great when I had my final day with the students. I think that they will be adding more detail to the backgrounds and the water. I am hoping that they add waves to the blue areas, more trees, some mountain villages, and maybe some stars.

Revisiting the Biography Project with Second Graders

The Biography Project Book project

Last year I teamed up with second grade teachers to design a book project that supported their curriculum objective of researching a famous person. The project created a good bit of excitement, so we decided to repeat it this year. Repeating a project gives us all the opportunity to make the project even better.

Biography Book, the first spread of pages

The concept is this: on the first spread of pages there is a mystery figure, and a book of clues so the viewer can guess the identity of the famous person, and learn something about this person when reading the clues.

Mary Musgrove in her environment

The second page places the person in their environment,. Here, Mary Musgrove is hunting a deer. The figure from the first page stands on her own, and can be exhibited in front of her illustrated home territory. There is an origami pocket on the left side that holds a small rubber band pamphlet, which contains a report on the person. As it turned out, having the pocketed book on the left (verso) page was a mistake: each time the page opens the little pamphlet book falls out of the pocket. Next time we will put the book on the right (recto) page.

Marco Polo Biography book, expanded

The book structure itself is based on a fold which I call the Book Base, a simply folded but  adaptable structure. Here the book about Marco Polo is opened up to show that the finished book is still just one piece of folded paper.

Marco in his own century

Here’s Marco Polo book set up for show.

Both the teachers and I did some things this year that felt better all around. Last year the teachers tried to get all the research done before and during the time that I was working with the students. I saw the students for three one-hour sessions over the course of two weeks.  Trying to get all the research and writing done before my last day with the students turned out to be stressful and unnecessary. This year I asked only that the students know what their person looked like before I arrived.  This was so that, after creating the basic book structure during the first class, that the students could start creating their person with paper, popsicle sticks, and material bits. A real stick figure! My other class time with the students was spent just creating the architecture of the book: we made a graduated page book for the clues; a rubber band book for most of the other written information;  origami pockets to hold the stick figure on one page and the little book on the other: we made an origami base to for the “who am ?” piece;  a pop-up on the second spread of pages and we explored decorative options.  With all of this in place, then the research began in earnest, after my time with the students was over. I think we were all happy with this sequence.

Stick figures, dressed

These dressed stick figures were the last thing we did during the first class. The students loved doing this part of the project.  The teachers told me that many students opted to continue working on them during recess.

There were so many really fine pieces of work done by these students that it was really hard to pick out which ones to show here.

I happened to walk into one of the classes about 10 days after my time with the students was officially over.  The students were gathered around a student who was presenting his book about Neil Armstrong. After his presentation the second graders around him were writing.

Each student was writing what they liked about their fellow student’s book . What a lovely way to honor each other’s work! Next, there will be a presentation for the parents, where the students dress up as the person they researched! This should go well, as it will be the second dressing.

Related posts:

Biography project proposal

Biography Project decorative details

Book-Figures

Lady Wearing a Pink Pillbox Hat

Each season that I am involved with classroom bookmaking students nudge me into making discoveries about how to think about bookmaking.  This year one of the  lessons that I walk away with is how satisfying it can be to bond with the bookmaking process through a personalized book-figure. Okay, that’s not a real term, but I don’t know what else to call it.

Brianna’s Flower

What I noticed was that once a child created an image for their book that they could sort of anthropomorphize they seemed to connect and care more about their subject matter and their book. For instance Brianna’s Flower (above) became a personal extension of herself, so her project became very much her very own, rather than just another assignment.

Charlie’s Dinosaurs

This connection seemed to be made if it was a fantasy flower, an extinct animal….

Endangered Animals…black and white drawings downloaded from the Enchanted Learning website. To give the animals more personality the students enhanced the eyes by making them bigger and defining the area around the eyeball.

…or endangered animals. When I started to noticing how students made connections to their books through these figures I began to encourage them to feel free rein while enhancing them through color….which led to some extravagant and lovely results.

Two women

I can’t remember who the ladies are in the photo above, but I like their taste in clothing.

Here’s the president and his wife, as created by the hands of second graders who were researching famous people.

chick

By the time I worked with first graders on their chick project I had figured out that the first thing we should do is cut out a chick (everyone had the same chick pattern to cut out).  I knew enough to encourage each child to give their own chick a personality by making an expressive eye,  giving the beak some color and shape and considering the shape of the wing.  If a chick became temporarily misplaced before we attached it into the book, the student would look for it as if she were looking for a personal friend, and it was a sweet reunion once the chick was found. 

 When I worked with second graders on their flower and plant book I told them not to worry about making a particular flower, but , instead to create a flower according to their own ideas about what would attract the kind of bee they want to be visited upon.  I loved the flowers that these students came up with! The most interesting thing that happened, though, was that as these book-figures developed I realized that, through these book figures, even I was connecting to the students books in a more personalized way.  One day I had to make a stop at a school sometime after my residency ended.  The completed projects were on display, and I had time to take a look at them.  One of the books housed the lady in the pink pillbox hat,  shown in the first photo of this post. She was such a character that I had to go back again with my camera to make sure I had a record of her. Fortunately, by the time I caught up with the teacher, Mr. Terri -who also happened to be the teacher who came up the concept of this project- the pink hatted lady was still in the classroom.  I would have been truly despondent had she gone home without  my photographing her.  Just a couple of days ago I showed her image to my friend, Ed. I was absolutely delighted that he immediately and correctly guessed her identity.

Here she is again, my book-figure friend Jackie Kennedy saying good-bye for  me as I am about to sign off on classroom bookmaking for the 2011-2012 school year.