2nd Grade Clay Dinosaurs

In recent years, 2nd graders have made clay insects.  As other art teachers know, it is nice to change up projects relatively often to keep things interesting.  This year, 2nd grade students made clay dinosaurs instead!  From a ceramic standpoint, this project focuses on scoring and attaching pieces of clay.  This project took four classes total.  On the first day, I showed a Keynote presentation with pictures of dinosaurs and even a short video.  Each student then chose one dinosaur from a big collection of books and drew that dinosaur.  On day two, I demonstrated how to make the dinosaurs out of clay.  Students took two 45 minute classes to create their clay dinosaurs.  On the fourth and final day, each student painted their dinosaur with tempera paints.  Those who finished early made landscape elements out of scrap construction paper for our display.  I really love how these turned out!