Animal Personality Drawings

Here is a really fun twist on self-portraits!  I teach the grades K-4/5 at my school and the middle school art teacher is in charge of grades 5/6-8.  We have a new art teacher at the middle school level this year and her name is Jayne Baitinger-Peterson.  She comes to our school with over 30 years teaching experience at the elementary level and she has been enjoying the change with middle school youth.  She gave me permission to share these super cool animal personality self-portraits on my blog.

Here is how Jayne described her lesson:

“7/8 students were presented with a list of character traits in order to find out what animal their personality was most like.  We had some fun identifying our traits and then matching these up with a variety of animal traits.  Character traits such as; stable, well grounded, aggressive, enthusiastic, conservative, out-going etc. etc. all pertain to either carnivores, herbivores, rodents and insectivores, birds or reptiles according to one research.  For example, according to a quiz that I took online in order to prepare for this lesson, I am a shrew, from the rodent and insectivore category. The next time I took the test I was a herbivore, a sheep. Not the animals I would have imagined I would be, not my favorite animals, but looking at the traits, I guess I resemble some of the character traits of each. Nonetheless, I drew myself as a polar bear.  Mathematically based self-portrait drawing methods were applied in order to draw our face.  Morphing the image of the animal into our own, overlapping the animal image with our own or combining animal parts with our own, were some ideas students came up with.”

Aren’t these fun?

Have you ever taught self-portraits in a non-traditional way?