Third Grade Ibis Birds

Our local art museum has an Egyptian sculpture of an ibis.  Ancient Egyptians believed the ibis bird was the god Thoth coming to earth. Thoth is the protector of the dead.  I love this sculpture.  It's so amazing and beautiful. This year I decided to add a new Egyptian project based on this sculpture:

The sculpture at the museum has legs and head made of bronze, and a carved wooden body (the body is a replacement of the original, but the head and legs are original).  I gave each student two black 6" x 6" pieces of construction paper and had them draw their own bird legs and head.  [pausing here for more wonderful photographs]

I did make a pattern for them to trace for the bird body, because I wanted them to be as big as possible.  We traced our pattern on the shiny side of white scratch-art paper using Sharpies.  It was so very hard to check to make sure all students glued the shiny side down! I did have a few who did it wrong, and so sorry, I don't have any extra scratch-art paper: please LISTEN TO THE TEACHER NEXT TIME!  We also learned (the hard way, of course) that it worked best to do all our drawing/tracing/cutting/gluing one day, and start our scratching the next time, after the glue had dried.

Because the ibis bird body (in the sculpture) was carved out of wood, it made sense to "carve" our bird bodies too.  I just told them they had to be repeating lines, shapes and designs.  I adore how they turned out!!!!

This student is an AMAZING student.  Her dad is in school to be an art teacher.

Close up of Amazing Student Work.  She's still working.

This lesson is definitely a "keeper"! They all turned out so wonderfully! (Assuming, of course, that they listed to the teacher and glued the shiny side of their scratch-art paper down so they could scratch off the white to reveal the color underneath.)