Poinsettia Guided Drawing

I know Christmas is over but I wanted to share a last minute art project we completed where my students exceeded all my expectations. 

Let me set the scene first…. It is the day before the Christmas concert (3 days before winter break) and my kiddos are WILD. I needed some filler activities because there was no way they would retain any new information. 

I search the internet for some interesting ideas and spotted a guided drawing activity for poinsettias. Perfect. Our class song for the Christmas concert is Don’t Eat a Poinsettia. Connection made!!!! 

I could have left it at that… do a quick drawing activity but NO I had to push them more (Why not? They can be focused at this time of year, right?) So I got thinking. How can I change it up a bit. I looked in my cupboards and saw my oil pastels. Hmmm. 

After playing around a bit with them I discovered that if you outline the shape with an oil pastel color and drag the pastel to the middle of the shape it makes a nice variegated color. Perfect. 

Here is how I had my class complete their poinsettias:

I precut the card stock to be an 8.5 x 8.5 square and did all the folding (so there are 4 sections – half then half again).

We practiced drawing the leaf shapes on scrap paper before starting the good copies. Because the leaves don’t have rounded tips I anticipated this would be a big problem for the students and I was right. I HIGHLY recommend practicing this first. 

Then the papers were handed out and using the smartboard I guided them through each step. It took quite a bit of time but I wanted them to be successful. One thing to tell them is that it doesn’t look that great as you are drawing but to stick with it because they turn out great. I reminded them of our focus on having a growth mindset (another connection!) and this helped. I am not going to lie — there were a few tears but in the end EVERY student loved what they did.

After using pencil to draw each part, students went over their work with a fine liner. Now time for the color. I demonstrated how to outline and drag in the color. It is very important that they do all the red, wash their hands, and then do the green. This will keep the colors from mixing. There will be some mixing but not too much. 

I was very impressed with how their poinsettias turned out and I love how even though they all had the same instructions they were all different. 

I quickly stapled them on the bulletin board outside the classroom and they admired their work. 

I will definitely do this art project again (and may be more creative with the final display if time permits..lol)

Cheers and Happy New Years!