Monsters

In this lesson, we learned about the color wheel, and how you can mix different primary colors (blue, red, yellow) together to get secondary colors (purple, green, orange). The teachers showed examples of this with food coloring in water. We then got to mix shaving cream and two different colors of paint (two primaries to make a secondary) in a cookie tray, making a swirly marbling design. We laid out a big piece of paper into the colorful design, making sure the entire paper was firmly planted in the shaving cream mixture. Afterwards, we laid the paper flat on the table and scraped off the excess shaving cream/paint with a ruler, making it easier for our paper to dry. We could cut out a "monster" in whatever shape we wanted, then decorate it however we wanted. I decided to make an octopus-looking monster. We gave our monster a name and had to pick three adjectives to describe it.

A good extension activity for this project would be to have students create some sort of ocean animal out of their paper, instead of just a monster. The teacher could distribute the paint in the shaving cream in dots rather than lines; perhaps the marbling effect would look more similar to fish scales that way. The students could then write a short story about an adventure their ocean animal goes on, giving them a chance to show what they know about a marine animal or learn something knew about the animal they choose to create. This could be accompanied by reading the book "The Rainbow Fish".