Polar Bear Projects

Last week my students finished up their (short) polar bear inquiry projects. I shared a Google Slides file with my students through Google Classroom, which you can find in my previous post. I included a title slide, instructions, and an example slide. Before starting their own "Polar Bears: Surviving in the Arctic" book I taught my students how to insert pictures using the Research Tools, change the background of a slide, add borders to pictures, mask pictures, and insert shapes.


As you can see some of my students really embraced the idea of changing their backgrounds! I also enjoyed seeing how some students used the text features we noticed when we explored non-fiction books. 

To continue with our polar bear learning, I found a great polar bear art project on Pinterest from Mary Making. You can check out her post here. I loved the Northern Lights for the background of the project and knew that I had to try it in my classroom! I also thought the link to the arctic in Social Studies was perfect.

We started with chalk pastels for the background and blended them up and down with a kleenex. Next, we used a grey or black crayon to sketch the outline of the trees before we used black tempra paint to paint the trees using upside down letter v's. Our last step was to draw the polar bear, cut it out, and glue it on the background. I used the instructions from ARTventurous for the polar bear. I absolutely LOVE the final products!