Activity 3E: Making a Mural
Children work together to create a large mural of an aquatic environment, using art materials to represent living and nonliving things like sea stars, rocks, and seaweed. They practice using descriptive words, explain their choices, and share their learning with the group while exploring textures, colors, and shapes.
- How do we know living and nonliving things are in the water around us? How can we show this to others? How can we share our learning with others?
- Living and nonliving things in Alaska waters come in a great assortment of colors, shapes, and sizes.
- Living things move, grow, and change.
Tell the children they are going to create a mural of an aquatic environment to teach others about their experiences and learning. Ask them to name all the living and nonliving things they can think of that are a part of an aquatic environment.
This could become:
- An interactive writing activity to engage more learners. Share the pen with children as they write the letters and/or words they know. Keep this part of the lesson going by providing paper and/or white boards to other children to keep them writing and engaged at the same time. Everyone gets an opportunity to add to the big class list.
- A roleplay of creatures or nonliving things. Children can act out the thing while others guess what it is, giving their explanations of how they know. For example, a child sits still and doesn’t move for a rock, or moves their fins to be a fish.
Support students to make a choice of how they will represent their living or nonliving thing. Explain how paints, markers, paper for sculpture, and/or bags for puppets might be used. Children will start with a first choice and then later they can self-choose an additional item or a way to add color or texture to the mural.
The aquatic environment may be a tide pool, lake, river, puddle, or something that is specific to their local experiences. Allow students choices of making living and nonliving things for that environment. Set up the classroom to have students work in small teams; some will work on the mural background while others cut and draw aquatic creatures, and others make rocks, sand, or mud. Place aquatic resources around the room (photos, magazines, books, and posters, etc.). Encourage the students to make textures by placing sand in the paint for sea stars, or supply a variety of fabrics with textures for students to create plants and animals with. Finger paints can be used for the background. Use large sheets of paper and cover a large area on the floor with a shower curtain to make a work area. Movement of water can be made with lines and movement of the hands. Paper in strips with paper fasteners can be used for sculptures with moving parts. Paper bags can be used to make puppets. Colorful paper can be used to make streamers in the classroom to simulate seaweed or kelp. Newspaper can be used for stuffing paper sculptures of larger rocks and/or living things. Once the living and nonliving things have been painted and dried they are attached to the mural with tape or in some other way.
As an example, a tide pool mural might include rocks, sand, mud, small fish, crabs, sea anemones, limpets, clams, seaweed, and sea stars. Some children may want to add gulls or other birds that get their food from an aquatic environment. This adds to the complexity of the art lesson, and adds ideas to make for a richer discussion.
When the mural is nearly done, children can gather to show their additions to each other. Support the students to use aquatic vocabulary along with describing words. Questions such as, “Why did you put your sea star in this place? or “How did you know where to put the rocks?” will support children to explain and defend their thinking with visual evidence.
Later, students can notice many of the things on the mural and explain their thinking of how they chose color, texture, size, and shape. This is good practice for presenting to an audience, as they will do during the culminating activity later.
As students finish their work on the big mural they can create their own individual tide pool and/or river environment, using art materials and supplies. Or, they could help a friend finish a part of the project. Children can read, write, or draw as they finish, letting others finish before everyone helps with the cleanup and once again gathers as a large group.
Gather the children together as a large group, or in smaller groups if some children need more time to finish their work. Use a checklist or a record of how children are able to explain their placement of a nonliving or living thing on the mural. Individual tide pools or other aquatic environments also provide evidence of understanding. Note which children are able to use their descriptive language independently and which children might need more support.
Print the photos and description of the pseudoscorpion. Print the small picture.
Compile resources and materials.
Print, copy and fold mini-books.
Prepare class book pages with the words printed out.
Cut, sort and organize textured materials.
Gather, prepare, and organize art materials for murals.
- Tagboard or construction paper for puzzles
- Larval to adult marine puzzles
- Larval to adult freshwater puzzles
- Science notebooks
- Resource books, posters, pictures, ID charts, films
- Objects from aquatic environments (shells, rocks, etc.)
- Picture and description of pseudoscorpion
- One mini-book per student
- “Class Book” pages with words printed on them
- A wide variety materials with texture; cloth, plastic, thread, yarn, etc.
- Glue or glue sticks
- Magazines for cutting
- Art materials: large sheets of paper, tempera paints, construction paper, newspaper, paper fasteners (brads), toothpicks, paper bags, markers, wire, and other materials. Children may have ideas of materials to use.
Information from previous lessons with plankton and microscopic creatures. Experience with animals such as class pets, and with a variety of living and nonliving things in the aquatic environment. Experience with glue or glue sticks.
aquatic, balance, body, bristles, change, claws, color, develop, environment, feel, grow, jaws, legs, living, look, move, mural, oval, non-living, phytoplankton, pincers, segments, shape, size, texture, zooplankton
Science GLEs Addressed
- A2, C2, C3
Ocean Literacy Principles
- The ocean supports a great diversity of life and ecosystems.