Bird Watching

I found this lesson on http://www.deepspacesparkle.com. I thought it was a great way to quickly assess the students for the upcoming conference week. I typically do not need to do formal assessments, but I like to provide the classroom teachers with any observations that I have about a student's fine motor skills and ability to follow multi-step instructions without doing art "under stress". The students were asked to imagine being the explorer who discovered a brand new bird species. Their job was to record the visual details of how the bird appeared. The students used a combination of oil pastels, Sharpies, and watercolors to document this newly observed bird!