Skeletons and Spiders – Patties Classroom

Candy corn and skeleton Art

We’ve been working on some cool art projects for our Halloween Bulletin Board. We did some tissue paper CANDY CORN. The kids designed their own piece of corn, then I cut out 2 inch squares of tissue paper in yellow, orange and white. Then they twisted them on their pencil eraser tops and glued them down in rows. They turn out fluffy and pretty.

Woven Skeletons

Then our whole 2nd grade makes these cute SKELETONS. We finished the candy corn last week and finished the Skeletons this week during art. So Here’s how to do the skeletons.

Cut 1 x 18 strips of black and white 8 of each color for each child. Then glue 2 whites together at the ends and 2 blacks together at the ends to make 4 long of each color. Then glue the white top edge to the black top edge at a 90 degree angle, like the picture below.

Then comes the fun part. Cross the white over the black in front, then the black over the white turning it a little as you go. It will always look like an L. Some kids crossed it behind and some kids crossed it in front. It doesn’t matter as long as you are consistent. It was pretty easy for them, they got into a rythm. When they got to the end of the strips they glued the last 2 bits together. Each of these make an arm or a leg.

Weaving the arms and legs for the paper skeleton….

We did a fun science matching the bone names to the picture of the skeleton parts of the body. It was fun!

Then they made the body with 18 x 2 1/2 inch strips, just 1 white and 1 black. You can see some kids doubled it and their body (belly section) is longer. We all decided the shorter looks better. Lastly we cut out heads, hands and feet that we had copied and glued them to the body. We added a brad to the head and connected it to the body so it could swivel around. Kids loved that part, as you can imagine.

Here’s our finished Candy Corn Art

We put the skeletons in all kinds of poses….

So here are our finished skeletons. We then learned about some of the bones in our skeletons and did a matching activity, and read a book on Skeletons. I also put together a take home bookbag for home reading called “THE SKELETON BAG” with 3 books inside on our skeletons, our bones and a book of Xrays of our bones. There is also some fun glow in the dark skeletons and some fun activity pages in a folder to do.

They look so funny on the bulletin board….One of their heads fell off today…. those bony bodies “crack” me up!

Then we wrote mini reports. I read them a non-fiction book on spiders and we wrote reports on spider stationary. I had collected 2 Weekly Readers and 1 Scholastic News on Spiders. We read all of them, then brainstormed facts about spiders on the board. Here’s our finished reports. They turned out great.