Belle's Butterfly Dreams: Under the Sea!

Last week we started our ocean unit. This is always a fun unit as there is so much to learn about under the sea. I decided our big art work for the summer would be an ocean scene on our art wall. I was going to just paint sand and water on easel paper but when the easel paper gets wet from paint it crinkles and isn’t easy to hang up or stay up on our wall. So I used construction paper. I cut sand waves from brown construction paper and water waves from blue construction paper. I did 2 rows of sand and 3 rows of water. I had planned on putting the darker blue on the bottom row but realized after it was all up what I did and wasn’t moving anything around again. Yes again, I had to move everything down to fit the top row in.

Our first ocean animal we made was our glittery crab. I precut the shapes we needed from red construction paper. We needed a large red circle for our crab’s body, 6 legs (I just cut strips), 2 claws, and 2 smaller strips for our crab’s eyes. For the eyes I cut 2 white circles and 2 smaller black circles.

To start Belle glued on all 6 legs to our crab’s body, three on each side. Then we added our small strips for his eyes to the top of our circle. We glued on the black circles to the white circles and then glued one on to each strip. Belle added a mouth with black marker when we were finished. After we were done our crab looked like it needed something. So we decided to add some silver glitter onto his body. When he was all dry we hung him up in our ocean.

I really wanted to make a whale this year. This one turned out really cute and was super easy to make. I cut out 2 circles one from black construction paper and one from white construction paper. I took the black circle and cut a scallop type shape from the bottom. I then took the scrap of black and cut it in half to use as the side fins. I cut the top fin from black construction paper with some extra paper at the bottom for the glue.

Belle glued the black circle on top of the white circle. We then added each of our fins and some googly eyes. For our whales mouth I cut some red yarn and we used white glue to trace the bottom of the black circle and laid the red yarn on the glue. When everything was dry we hung our killer whale in our ocean.

Belle loves seahorses so I knew we had to make a seahorse. It took a while for me to decide on what to do. Seahorses are supposed to be pretty and colorful (or at least that is what we always imagine them to look like). I finally decided that we would water color a couple of seahorses. I printed out a seahorse pattern and traced it on to white construction paper. I let Belle go to town on painting them. When they were dry we gave each an eye and I cut them out. We stuck them up in the ocean.

After I figured out all our ocean animals we were going to make I decided we needed a shark. But nothing that was going to take a while or be too time consuming. So I drew up a shark onto blue construction paper and then cut each out. I did two since they were pretty small. I cut out a top fin and a bottom fin that we glued onto the sharks. I drew on some smiles with black marker in advance and cut out tiny white triangles from white paper. We glued the triangles onto our sharks smile as their teeth. We added an eye to each and added them to our ocean.