Wax resist whale shark pictures

We started read the book 'Surprising Sharks' this week with the children and surprising it definitely is!! Did you know sharks only kill around 6 people a year but that we kill 100 million sharks each year? Sobering thought! Anyway, we then decided to draw pictures of sharks and one of the options was to use candles to draw with to create wax resist pictures. It turned out that the candles were too hard to work with for most of the children (because you had to press so hard to make it work) but they had good fun trying and it was a great exercise for those finger muscles. In the end, we gave them silver crayons and then went over their lines with a candle before they put on the ink. I love the fact that each picture is unique, focussing on the aspects that each child saw as most prominent. Some focussed on the spots on the whale sharks whilst others thought the pointy fins were more important and naturally there was one who just enjoyed the sensation of the crayon on the paper.... :-D

I left the same materials out this afternoon with complete freedom and was really impressed with the seahorses, crabs and starfish that were presented to me at the end of the afternoon. I think it is really important to offer materials that have been used for teaching independently again later - the best experimenting and discussions always seem to occur!!

Drawing the whale shark

Using black and blue watered down inks to colour.

Et voila!