Mayumba Pen Pals

Oval: Recently a call went out from our Roots and Shoots group to make pictures to send to these African kids in Muyumba. These are kids who are concerned about the environment. Some of our kids got together and made pictures of their favorite animals from around our area. Mayumba is on the west coast of Africa, and right on the ocean. We hope to hear back from them soon!! To learn more, click the links below: Mayumba National Park Being a kid in Mayumba The Pen Pal Program

First, I gave the kids an overview of a few techniques for using water colours and cray-pas (oil based crayons). Once they had those down, they set to work choosing their creatures carefully! The pictures came out really well. They filled the pictures entirely, and each worked hard to make their animal unique!

Audrey drew her three favorite animals in our yard, an owl, a frog and a fox...which looked more like a chow, so she says it is a chow-chow. But I think it looks like a fluffy fox oh please….

Ashley did a horse, and used a very interesting technique on her ground mixing the two medias into one. Cool effect!

Emily used salt in her water colours. By leaving the salts on, it gave a darker texture to her page! Neat!

Alex used all cray-pas, and layered his black and silver to give his snake a silky sheen!

Spencer made a tarantula! Creepy!

Oval: Somehow, Malena and Spencer missed the photo opts—probably because they had wet pictures! Malena also made a horse, and Spencer was all about a tarantula, which, we don’t have and are not native to here—even Cade made a picture, which looked like a bluebird and a turtle.

Oval: Another cool thing, is these kids speak French—so our kids wrote the names of their critters in French! You can see it really clearly in Alex’s picture!