Making Turtles

This was a long term project that has taken us weeks to complete. It's awesome when an interest in a particular subject continues long enough to complete a project like this. In this case the interest was in turtles. We used the knowledge that we have gained over the past weeks to help us create our own sea turtles out of various materials.

We started the project with the idea that we would try to make a sea turtles shell. We talked about the shape, looked at pictures and used tin foil to form something that resembled a turtle shell.

The next part of this project involved paper mache. We dipped strips of newspaper into a mixture of flour, glue and water and placed them over our foil  shell shapes.

After they dried we used a black marker to draw detail on the turtle shells.

We painted our turtle shells a special "turtle color " using slightly watered down tempera paint.

We supplied clay and asked the children to make a turtle body to go with its shell.

Some of our friends understood that a turtle has a body inside its shell. Some of our younger friends tried to attach the clay to the sides of their shell. This led to some great conversations about turtle anatomy. 

Our turtles are finally finished and proudly displayed in our studio and our kitchen.