Kindergartners love dinosaurs.

Kindergartners love dinosaurs! This lesson integrates art, language arts, and science in an enjoyable, creative project about dinosaurs. In my art class, many of my lessons integrate art and reading. The classroom teacher appreciates the language and science connections and the emphasis on reading. The children enjoy being illustrators and becoming familiar with well-known children's illustrators.

I teach two kindergarten classes per week. Each class is thirty minutes long, therefore projects typically take no longer than two class periods to complete. I find that young children tend to lose interest in a project if it takes too long. My lessons are designed to best utilize the time while encouraging creativity and the exploration of materials.

First Class

I begin by reading aloud the book How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight, written and illustrated by Jane Yolen. It is a book of poetry that is amusing and attractively illustrated. The poetry encourages children to become motivated about the subject. The class explores the poetry through discussion and by adding key words on a word wall posted in the artroom. The word wall continues to grow as the lesson continues. Examples of words suggested by dinosaurs are scaly, bony, rough, large, wings, gigantic, and so on.

Students are now ready to begin the art activity. I give them bowls of wooden mosaic pieces in a variety of shapes and sizes and encourage them to arrange the pieces on pieces of tag board until a desired dinosaur shape is created. I ask them to experiment with the different shapes and placement of the wood pieces. When the children are pleased with their dinosaurs (real or imagined), then it is time to glue them onto the tag board. Since kindergartners tend to pour too much glue on their artwork, I demonstrate how to use only two or three dots of glue on each piece of wood. After gluing is complete, the work is put up to dry until the next class period.

Second Class

At the beginning of the second class, I read aloud a few favorite poems from the book. This helps the children refocus on their work and become excited about working on the backgrounds. We also discuss how the children think that a prehistoric landscape would have looked. As they let their imaginations take over, more descriptive words are added to the word wall. We are now ready to paint the background with watercolor. (We do not use pencil first.) The objective is for the background to be spontaneous and creative. I encourage the children to use bold and bright colors. I demonstrate how to paint with watercolors, reminding students to wash their brushes well between colors so the paint does not become muddy looking. When the painting is finished and dry, students outline large shapes with fine-point black permanent markers. Finally, they use paint or markers (their choice) to color their wooden dinosaurs.

The children are very excited about their completed dinosaur pictures. At the end of the class, they sit in a circle and take turns sharing their artwork. Parents enjoy seeing the dinosaurs displayed in the school hallway, and teachers and administrators appreciate the integration of language arts and science into the arts.

Materials

* wooden mosaic pieces (available from mail-order art supply catalogs)

* tag board

* glue

* watercolors, brushes, water

* paper towels

* fine-point black permanent-markers, colored markers

NATIONAL STANDARD

Students make connections between visual arts and other disciplines.

WEB LINK

Discovering Dinosaurs, www. search.eb.com/dinosaurs/dinosaurs/ index2.html

Dinosaurs, www.kidskonnect.com/ Dinosaurs/DinoHome.html

Scholastic Dinosaurs, www.teacher. scholastic.com/activities/dinosaurs/

Marcy Stollon teaches art at Akiba Academy in Dallas, Texas. [e-mail]