Northern Lights

I love how this activity turned out, and as much as I hate the mess that comes along with chalk pastels, I will definitely do this one again. To begin we did a little science learning about what the northern lights actually are and how they occur.  You can find some fairly simple videos on youtube for this, I did this with fourth grade, so I thought it was an important step.  If I was doing this with younger students I might just show them images of the northern lights, and discuss where they can be seen.  This activity was done in two parts, white chalk and charcoal on grey paper for the polar bears and bright colored chalk on black paper for the lights.  So first, the lights: Students looked at images of the lights on a slide show I created, and then we discussed analogous colors, why and how they blend together so well, and how to find them on the color wheel.   Once students drew the lights we then painted trees with black tempera paint.  The second step was to create a polar bear head, and for this we also studied a photo from the internet of a polar bear to help with shape and details.  We drew with pencil first, colored with white chalk then went over the pencil with black charcoal and used out finger to blend a bit.  I found this awesome lesson here. It is one of my favorite blogs!