INDIAN ELEPHANTS - animals and Diwali topic + colour mixing and pattern making.

UPDATE: FOR 2011 DIWALI IDEAS GO HERE!

Diwali was celebrated this year during our Animals topic.  As an introduction I found some fantastic photos on Google of painted Indian elephants to inspire us and the children enjoyed dancing to Bindi Irwin's, Elephant of India. 

We experimented with colour mixing to make grey by mixing the colour straight onto a template of an elephant.

It didn't matter if the elephant got lost in the process.  The children decided upon the degree of 'greyness' for their individual elephant.

Next came the 'painting' of designs on the elephants.  We used pastels.  Check out the pattern making on the toes :)

We finished with a decorated cover for our elephants and glued the picture onto a larger piece of coloured paper for our patterned border.

Some children added 'googly' eyes.

Others preferred to make their own.

We continued with our colour mixing by creating some hand print (wings) parrots.

And then put them together for a colourful display.  We hung a couple of parrots from the ceiling just in front of the display to give  more of a 3D effect.


Thanks to Laura at Painted Paper for the great idea.