Painted Elephants on Parade

Here are our adorable little clay elephants!  Aren't they just so amazing?  Warning: this will be a photo-heavy post.

So, we started out with our bisque fired elephants:

And we colored them with the Crayola Metallic FX crayons (a heavy coat of color worked best):

Next we used black block tempera to paint over the crayon.  I use black cake tempera so often that I keep them ready to go in some extra trays I had--you'd be amazed how often black tempera by itself really comes in handy.

Finally we used (plastic) raffia to string them together.  

Many students forgot to add their hole (du-oh!) or their hole closed up (awwwww), and it was still okay.  They're still cool.  Some students came up with creative solutions to this problem, and some didn't want them on the raffia at all (still totally fine).  I liked this lesson because everyone found success and none of them looked alike and they all had personality.

Metallic crayons + black block tempera=SUCCESS!