Since the holiday break, students have been working on the Bird Inquiry. This inquiry is structured much the same as the Insect and Leaf Inquiries. The birds students have been working with are all birds that can be seen in the San Leandro area: Robin, Towhee, Great Blue Heron, Red-Tailed Hawk, Hummingbird, House Finch, White-Crowned Sparrow, Blue Jay, Chickadee, Mallard Duck, Seagull and Golden Eagle.
To view student crayon observational drawings of birds, click on the links below:
After making a couple observational drawings, students sketched diagrams of a basic bird shape using simple shapes. Click here to see the gallery of bird diagrams.
Next, we discussed how, once you know the basic structure of a bird, you can then play around with the structure to make an original bird. Students were asked to make decisions about whether their bird would have a small or large head, short or long legs, big or little eyes, etc. Then the students created a crayon drawing of a bird using exaggeration. Click here to see the gallery of exaggerated birds.
Finally, students folded their paper in four and created several birds--the objective of this assignment was to again change the sizes of the head, legs, tail, head, beak, eyes and wings but to this time make the bird more 'realistic' and give it a name. Click here to see this gallery of bird sketches.