Arctic Crafts

Northern Lights Igloo Art Project

This is a dreamy way to create a beautiful Arctic sunset or Northern lights backdrop for your winter scenes.

Materials:

Aurora: A Tale of the Northern Lights

Alaskan storyteller and artist Mindy Dwyer has created a magical story of a young girl whose seeking and dreams lead her to a great discovery. The bright, luminous illustrations that accompany the story magically portray this tale of the origin of the Aurora Borealis, the glorious northern lights.

Step 1

Cut out your igloo template a glue lightly to your art paper.

Step 2

Cut your bleeding tissue paper into thin strips.

Step 3

Using water and a paintbrush, begin to wet your paper and lay down strips of tissue paper. Wet the top of the tissue paper as well.

Step 4

Layer your tissue paper to blend the colors. Continue to wet the paper as you go.

Step 5

Fill your paper with tissue paper strips. Allow to dry.

Step 6

When dry, carefully peel back your tissue stips to reveal the color patterns below.

Step 7

Use Watercolor Crayons (or simple watercolor paints) to add some color to your igloo.

Sugar Cube Igloo

September 28, 2010 By Valerie Mcclintick Leave a Comment

We are wrapping up our studies on the Inuit tribes of North America with a fun sugar cube igloo:

For this project we watched this dated, but informative video on “How to build an igloo” and paired our craft with this fantastic early reader:

A Look Inside an Igloo

The kids had a blast with this project, as we added a layer of cubes every day to allow them time to dry.

We also spent some time exploring the fantastic videos on Sila. My children were just fascinated by these, so far they’ve seen the building of an igloo, the hunting of a caribou, and even a church service with a lesson on Moses. I haven’t seen them all so I’d recommend watching them on your own first to decide, as often with Native American culture you can get into spiritual discussions.

This week we also reviewed what we know about Arctic animals with this fun Arctic Animals File Folder Game!

Stay tuned for more Native American Crafts as we move on to the Tlingit tribes!

Arctic Watercolor

September 16, 2010 By Valerie Mcclintick Leave a Comment

We will be lapbooking all of our fun Arctic learning, so this week the kids made some beautiful watercolor artwork, inspired by the wonderful illustrations in this book:

“My Arctic 1,2,3”

We loved this book because a new animal is introduced for each page, and below the pictures children can see how the animals names are written in traditional Inukitut. At the back of the book there is a section where the author discusses his childhood encounters with each animal, while growing up in the Arctic. Bubba especially loved this part of the book, hearing about a young boy who had so many fantastic adventures.

My kiddos picked their favorite animal of the group and used a combination of watercolor, colored pencils, and pastels to complete their drawings.

We cut down the edges of the paintings, and glued them to our lapbooks for cover art. I then helped the children write the name of the animal in Inukitut next to their paintings:

If you can’t tell, Sissy(7) did “Killer Whales”, and Bubba(4) did “Arctic Char” (which are fish)

I think they turned out beautiful and they are super excited to fill them up with everything they are learning!

Here is a link to a tutorial with discussion questions for using this craft in your classroom.

Stay tuned for more Arctic Fun!