A Bloom of Jellyfish

The technical term for a group of jellyfish is a smack or a bloom. Considering how beautiful and ethereal these kindergarten mixed media works are, I'm going with bloom. I did this lesson a couple years ago here and decided to give it another go. We broke down our jellyfish into 3 parts: the bell or hood which starts out with a simple curved line. We looked at pictures of all different colored creatures and learned these colors hide what the jellyfish has eaten to protect themselves from prey. So the children could use whatever color chalk pastels they wanted. Next came the oral arms which grab the food and feed it to the mouth on the underside of the creature. These often look like ribbons. At this point we switched to oil pastel and drew long skinny tentacles (where the stinging cells exist) in a variety of colors.  My kinders did a great job of carefully painting around their chalk pastel creatures and painting right on top of their oil pastel tentacles. They could instantly see the difference between these two medias. They sprinkled salt on top for a bubbly effect. Once these were dry, glued strands of yarn were added for more tentacles.

1st grade work