First Grade Line Monsters

Materials Needed

• Watercolor paper
• Crayons
• Watercolor markers
• Spray bottles
• Thick black markers
• Scissors
• Black paper
• Construction paper crayons
• Line poster

I did this one around Halloween time. We read the book There's A Monster in My Closet by Mercer Mayer. We looked at all of the monsters in the book. We focused on eyes, teeth, fingers, etc. Then I had each student draw their very own monster. We talked about how it needed to be larger than their hand (we didn't want any mini-monsters). They could draw as many arms, legs, eyes, etc as they wanted. It was their own creation. They traced their monster with a black marker.

We reviewed 2 concepts next: warm/cool colors and lines. They had to choose whether they wanted their monster to be warm or cool and then they filled their monster with a variety of lines: zig zag, wavy, spiral, dotted, etc using the colors that they had chosen (with crayons).

I demonstrated how to paint their monster using a wet-on-wet wash, continuing with the same colors that they were already using.

They cut their monsters out (we reviewed how to hold our scissors) and glued them onto a piece of black construction paper with glue dots ("just a dot, not a lot").

We finished the project by tracing around the monsters with construction paper crayons (they show up really well on the black paper) in the opposite color scheme than they had previously used. Pin It