Kindergarten Talking Cows

When I stumbled upon this project via Pinterest I knew it was perfect for my Kindergarteners. One of my favorite things to explore with Kindergarteners is perspective. We do it in a pretty minimal sense, along the lines of "What would this look like REALLY up close?" but perspective nonetheless.

I Can Statement: I can talk about how things look different from different sides and close up.

Day 1: Read one of the most hilarious books I have ever read. I mean literally laughing out loud the first time I read it.

I knew starting the project I didn't want just black and white cows so I used the "uniqueness" of this cow to say that our cows were also going to be unique by being different colors.

Before we started any drawing I used this lucidpress document that I created to explore how cows can look really different from the front than the side and the nose can look HUGE when they are really close to you. After talking about these differences and watching the youtube video we did a draw along in sharpie only of the cows. While the draw along was happening I talked about different things they could do to make their cows look more unique and different from the other cows even before we added color.

Once the cows were drawn they chose whatever watercolors they wanted for their cow and we all used red tempera paint for the tongues of the cows.

Day 2: Started with another favorite book of mine....

Really great interactive book where you lift the mouths open of each animal and you see the inside of their mouth with their animal sound.

I used the idea of animal sounds and inspiration from our first book to add speech bubbles to the cows. It was a really fun discussion with the kids talking about what speech bubbles were, how they worked, and the kinds of things our cows could say. I love seeing their ideas unfold and build off others.

I had the speech bubbles pre-drawn on cardstock and after they wrote what their cow was saying and cut out the bubble, we glued a piece of cardboard under it to look like it was floating over the paper.

These were so funny hanging next to each other, it looked like they were all having one big conversation....