The third graders made these beautiful tree reflection pictures. They folded water color paper in half and painted the bottom half to look like water. We used a water color technique called "wet-on-wet." This is where you get the paints wet and the paper wet, then touch the paint on to the paper. It creates a kind of "fireworks" effect and the paints spread out quickly. On the top half the students drew two trees, painted them brown and as they painted they periodically folded the paper in half to create a "reflection" or a print on the bottom half of the paper. We used small sponges and red, orange, yellow and green paint to blot the leaves on the trees. The paper was then folded in half again to create the reflection of the leaves.
The students did a writing assignment to re-tell what they did in this project step by step. This writing was used as an assessment for the over all project.