Four Layers of

. . . the rainforest.  Surely, you KNEW that was what I was going to say? 

Second grade learned all about the rainforest with a Smart Notebook presentation.  I got it off the Smart Notebook Exchange and modified it to meet my needs.  You can get it here (find the one entitled, 'Rainforest' and while you're there, get 'Rainforest Animals' too).  We spent a class period just talking about the rainforest (we also talked about movies students may have seen like Up).  We then painted with tempera cakes (I like the Biggie cakes) on 12 x 18 white paper.

We spent a class period or two painting, and then a couple of class periods drawing a variety of rainforest animals on 9 x 12 paper.  I put the single slide of rainforest animals up on the Smartboard, as well as books on every table that I got from the school library.  We drew with pencil and colored with skinny markers (more variety of colors in those sets).

A tiger on the forest floor.

A jaguar hanging out in the understory layer.

Red eyed tree frogs are a second grade favorite!

Then (bet you saw this coming) we cut and glued our rainforest animals onto our rainforest backgrounds.  I had many who did some lazy cutting easier cutting by cutting around the animal rather than on/close to the line.  We'll be cutting many more times in second grade, so we will get better at cutting!

Not wild about the cutting, LOVE the sky in this one.

Notice the claws on the leaping jaguar.

Finally we used botantical cuts to add some camouflage and a more jungle-y look:

I love this one, so JUNGLE-Y!

Something about the blue bird is very peaceful to me on this one.

This student spent so long on his snake, getting it through the vines.

What's not to love here? Spiders, parrots and jaguars, OH MY!

I also had them glue an "I Learned" sheet on the bottom (literally a strip of copy paper, cut into strips with the sentence starter When I did this project I learned:)
I love that all of these are so different, and as soon as the painters are done re-painting the walls of our school, I'll put them up in the hall.  Speaking of different:

Ahh, a beautiful rainbow!

Oooo, stormy skies! Really thinking here!

?????? 

In all seriousness, I love it when kids are totally different and marching to their own drums!
Art teacher on, friends!