Second Grade Barn Dance

Materials Needed

• watercolor paper
• 1/2 sheet watercolor paper- scarecrow
• oil pastels
• watercolors
• brushes
• black permanent markers
• kosher salt
• self-adhesive foam buttons
• pencils/erasers
• straw/raffia- 1" pieces
Barn Dance- Bill Martin, Jr

Getting to Know series- Moses, Rockwell Norman Rockwell prints
Grandma Moses prints


I began the project by reading the book Barn Dance by Bill Martin, Jr to my second graders. As I was reading, I asked the students to focus on the following things: the scarecrow, the objects they saw on the farm. When I finished reading, we brainstormed a list of things that could be found on a farm. We also talked about what the scarecrow looked like- what was he wearing, what is his job, etc.

I gave the students a 1/2 piece of watercolor paper and asked them to draw a scarecrow. I demonstrated how they could use basic shapes (squares, rectangles, circles, triangles, etc) to draw the body, clothes, patches of their scarecrow. They traced their scarecrow with black marker and then painted him/her using watercolor markers.


When it was time to work on the background paper, we had a discussion about foreground and background. We looked at different landscape prints and pointed out the size of objects that were in the foreground and in the background. We also took note of how the horizon line is rarely is straight line.

I had them draw their background in pencil, adding any details that they wanted to have on their farm- reminding them to keep in mind size. They traced everything with a black marker.

They used oil pastels to color their barn, animals, trees, and at the end added white stars in the sky. They did not color their ground or sky with pastels.

Once the oil pastels were finished, we got out the watercolors again. They used the watercolors to paint their ground (most used green, however, a few used brown) and the sky. We were looking for a night sky, so most used black (we rarely get to use black watercolor, so this was pretty exciting!). I showed them how to dilute the color so that it was not pitch black.

When the background is dry, the students cut out their scarecrows and stuck them on using self-adhesive foam "O" to give it a 3-dimensional feel. I had pieces of raffia ready and they added these onto their scarecrow for a little more detail. Pin It