Matryoshka/Russian nesting dolls - grade 2/3

I saw this amazing idea for Matryoshka dolls on Deep Space Sparkle, and just had to try it with my grade2/3’s. This project required a fair amount of preparation – I prepared 20 tracers each of a small, medium, and large sized doll (my lovely sixth graders cut them out for me.) I spent a lot of time teaching the 2/3 graders how to trace the dolls so that one was in front of the two others.

 They traced in Sharpie, so there wasn’t any room for erasing! Luckily, they ALL managed to get those dolls on their pages, which meant we could move onto the fun stuff – drawing the patterns inside.

We looked at pictures of Matryoshka dolls and talked about the patterns inside – how you wouldn’t see a house or a face in the pattern;I encouraged them to use flowing lines, flowers, hearts, simple shapes, etc. They coloured the doll entirely in marker, except the face, which was done with pencil crayon. They painted their backgrounds using cool colored liquid watercolor paint (Which. I. Love.) and then glued their dolls on top.They were SO proud, and I must say, I adore how these turned out!