Viking Ships!

Leif Erikson Day was on October 9th so that seemed like a good idea to do a project on! Leif Erikson was the first European to come to North America, about 500 years before Christopher Columbus arrived. The kids thought I was joking when I told them that vikings were real. They thought that vikings were just something that was on the Minnesota Vikings (SKOL VIKINGS!) helmet. Then we had to have a discussion about the difference between vikings and dwarfs which was an understandable confusion due to their similar appearances.

This is another one of Cassie Stephens' amazingggg projects.

Our first day of the project was probably the most hectic art class I've ever had. It was CRAZY how much we had going on. First, students needed to sponge paint a large sheet of paper white. Then they were to sponge over top of that with two other colors of their choosing. Then they needed to pick up a strip of white paper and a strip of blue. With the blue one, we gently splatter painted white paint onto it. With the white one, we dry-brushed blue and then white paint, going from the center of the page out to the edge.

On the second day, we tore our two strips of paper the long way. Then we layered the torn strips on top of each other, starting at the center and working our way down to the bottom of our sponge-painted paper. We only put glue on the straight edges of our torn strips, NOT the torn edges. This would allow us to curl our waves later in the project. We also used a tracer to create a ship and then added a mast.

For the third day, we created a sail. We added stripes to the sail and a small tribe symbol. When we attached the sail to our mast, we put glue on the top and bottom of the sail and gave it a slight pinch when gluing it down. This created a small curve to our sail so that it popped out from our artwork a bit.

On our last day, we added small shields to the edge of our ship. Then we curled our torn-edge waves around a pencil so that the waves popped off the paper like our sails did. After they were done with their project, we had a little writing assignment about our viking ships. Writing in art?!?! I know. Crazy right? I asked the kids to tell me about their viking ship. Where were they going? Why were they going there? They were asked to write four COMPLETE SENTENCES. They had some pretty comical and creative responses!

I got so many compliments from the other teachers about these! Our artists did so well!