Marvelous Mixed Media Jungle Art Lesson:1st Grader Approved

Try this take on the classic Henri Rousseau jungle art lesson with your first grade students. This link for the National Gallery of Art poses some great questions to ask your students.

My first graders created mixed media jungle scenes and really took to the process.  This jungle art lesson would also work well for second and third graders. Within this lesson we practiced: drawing, tracing, cutting, painting, color mixing and gluing. 

During the first class session,  I introduced the kids to the art of Henri Rousseau and read a book about the jungle.  Next, I provided them with 12×18 construction or drawing paper and a Jungle Ideas handout.  They filled the page with 5 or more jungle creatures.  They were encouraged to draw large, as it would make cutting easier later.  I give them a handout with jungle creature ideas that I drew ahead of time for them.  They are not limited to these ideas, but it often helps them to get started. 

I like to demonstrate how to draw lightly with simple shapes and add details.  I try to give them as much creative freedom as possible so I try to keep the demo simple.  If there is time they will begin to outline their drawings in an ultra fine sharpie. My classes are 60 minutes, so you may have to adjust how much is completed in one class.

During the 2nd session, the students will finish outlining, color neatly with colored pencils and cut their animals out to the best of their ability. I like to give them a ziplock bag with their name(prepped ahead of time and left on the table) to collect their animals for later on in the project.  It’s okay if they don’t finish all of the steps in this class. They can pick this back up in a future session.  

Session 3: For the background, I had the kids do a quick wash of greens, yellow and white with tempera cakes. The light background is a nice contrast to the more vibrant liquid tempera colors that we used. If it seems too much to do, in addition to painting the jungle features, you can give the kids their choice of light green construction paper instead.  Each student will need yellow, green and a small amount of blue and white liquid tempera paint (prepped ahead of time). I didn’t provide water to wash brushes. This enables them to mix different shades of green as they go along.  If they wanted to add tropical flowers with pink and orange they simply wiped off as much paint as they could in a paper towel.

I had a handout with various jungle plants already out on the tables.  I did a quick demo and a discussion about proper painting techniques. The students proceeded to fill up their papers with the plants of their choice. They painted directly on their papers without drawing in pencil first.

Final Session for the Jungle Art Lesson- To prep for this class, I stapled their final paintings onto black paper, added their name and placed a variety of green and yellow colored pencils on the tables.  The kids played around with compositions before they glued neatly.  Using the colored pencils they drew vines going around the construction paper border.  We had time to do a class gallery walk and work on a jungle themed coloring page. 

Check out my Jungle Ideas handout in TPT. These are the handouts that I used in my Jungle Art Lesson.

You may also like my previous blog post on using idea starters in your classroom. I used this type of resource in my Jungle Lesson.