Little Monsters

The above is a collage of tiny tiny pictures of my fourth grade students' little monsters (Please click to enlarge!). In my elementary art classes, we've been practicing the application of previous knowledge in the form of drawing monsters; by first, drawing five animals, identifying the obvious parts of those five animals and then combining them in order to create monsters.

In Chinese, using the different parts of 动物 to create 怪物。If you don't speak Chinese, the wordplay may be lost on you. The clever one word change pleases all the elementary school students. My delivery is usually met with gasps and giggles.

The head of a giraffe, the body of a butterfly, the legs of a mouse

This is one of my favorite pictures. I had each of the students name their monster along with a listed description of the different animals components by which their little monster was made.


I urged each student to take liberties in coloring their monsters.

This is another one of my favorites due to it's sheer SCARINESS. A simple cross between a butterfly and a rabbit. It is nightmare inducing and slightly cute except for its sharp side teeth. AHH. Enlarge at your own risk!

I introduced this project to my students last week. The assignment was to draw 5 animals, 1 monster and each additional monster would equal one point on either the girls' or the boys' side. The winner of the rivalry gets to participate in the blind man's grab bag, which I will further explain at a later date. For homework, I told the students to draw more little monsters, as well as circle their favorite creation.

What you see in this post are what the students have selected. I expected my students to do my homework. What I didn't expect was them to take it by the teeth and fly it across the world to America. I say that because after entering class today, I was bombarded by 45 fourth graders each with notebooks full of little monsters. I drew stars for the boys' work and hearts to mark each little monster of the girls. One boy drew 78 little monsters for homework.  I spent all period forcing my students to come up one row at a time to stand in an orderly fashion as I marked and tallied each little monster. The grand total for each side came in favor of the girls. The girl had a strong showing of 661 monsters while the boys tried valiantly but failed at 639 monsters. AH! I found a project that the students loved :)!