John James Audubon

This week we had a visitor in the library, Jaqueline Davies, who wrote the book The Boy Who Drew Birds, which is all about John James Audubon.

So for the 2nd and 3rd graders who got to meet her, we are looking at the artwork of John James Audubon this week to see how much we can learn about different species of birds just by looking at his illustrations.

For example, this golden eagle painting lets us see not only the characteristics of the bird, like it's size, color, ability to fly etc., but we also see something about the eagle's diet and habitat. We can see that it lives high in the mountains, can tolerate colder climates and hunts and eats small mammals. The students were then asked to think of an animal that they have observed and illustrate that animal in it's habitat and give clues about its diet in their illustration. We also used mixed media since we learned from this video that John James Audubon was also an early mixed media artist.