Time to Sleep

I love this book!!!!  And my three year old loves this book, which is why I had to use a library copy in my classroom.  (Our copy had to stay at home to be read nightly)

Time To Sleep by Denise Fleming

It was during one of those nightly readings that I decided it's a perfect book for an art lesson.  I came up with a painting/printmaking/collage sort of lesson for second grade.  

After doing the lesson, I think it's probably more appropriate for fourth grade because it took second graders forever.
We started by reading the book (well, I read the book aloud while they listened) and painting a 12 x 18 paper red using tempera block.  Then we used paste (had to be paste, believe me, I tried tape, glue stick, just holding. . .) to glue a few maple leaves to our painting.  We then painted over/around them with yellow liquid tempera, and learned the hard way to peel the leaves off before the paste dried.  Next we added hills and grass (second grade grass, NOT kindergarten easy fringe grass) and talked about hibernation.  I made a little Smart Notebook file that you can get here--just download the one entitled "Hibernating Animals".  It's got a "What Do We Already Know?" page, a page with a short video clip and a couple of songs, and a page of photographs of animals that hibernate.  

Sheesh, I wouldn't want to run into this skunk!

Then we drew some animals that hibernate on white paper using oil pastel (I had them draw them with red or blue oil pastel, so they'd be similar to the style of illustrations in the book). Oh! and we did another day of pasting/painting around leaves on 6 x 9 red or orange construction paper with blue paint--those got collaged on at the end.
Lastly, we put it all together. 

Shot of the hallway display.

Close-up of a well-drawn skunk.

Love how the snail is BEHIND the grass.

WHEW!!! It was a LOT of work.  
Here's what I learned: one person cannot gather enough maple leaves for 80 children to each have 4 or 5 (send out an email and ask for help), maple leaves need to be pressed otherwise they get too crunchy/dried out to use in printmaking (and you can press a whole plastic shopping bag full at a time, they don't really need to be all sorted out) and when paste dries it looks a lot like frost (at least, that's what I told them so they'd stop complaining about the gobs of paste on their papers). I also learned a little more about hibernation than I knew before--but aren't we all lifelong learners if we're teachers?

My example that's been on the board for what seems like
months while we work our tails off on this project.