Giraffes Can't Dance

Third Grade students looked at the artwork of Edgar Degas, an artist who loved to draw and paint dancers. He was very interested in drawing people in motion and spent a lot of time doing gesture drawings, or drawings of people moving. Students then read "Giraffes Can't Dance" by Giles Andreae. Students drew a giraffe dancing and colored it with markers. Then they painted a background for their giraffe, much like the illustrations in the book. They focused on the different values in a moonlit sky and painted the sky lighter near the moon, and darker away from the moon.