Earth Day Posters That Pop

Objective: Transform a photo of your hand into a piece of art that shares what you are learning about Earth Day with others. 

Building knowledge: With teacher guidance and content materials, students will explore the meaning of Earth Day and ways they can help keep the earth clean and sustainable in their daily lives. Using video, text, and personal knowledge, students will discuss the Three R’s and how reducing, recycling, and reusing can help keep our earth clean.

Design Process: Students work together using the camera app on their iPad to take SQUARE photos of their open hands with a plain background. Using pieces of bulletin board paper worked great for team photo opportunities. Using the SQUARE photo setting gives younger students less background to color which can help in completing this project in a timely manner. 

Students tap on the photo of their hand and tap edit. Use filters to change to MONO. Then tap on the pencil tool circle to open up the Markup tool pallet. Tap on the highlighter tool, choose the thickness and color to create the background sky. Then use a finger or stylus to trace around the hand and fill in the background of the photo with the sky color.   

Students can use two fingers to zoom into their photo as they are tracing, coloring, and designing their objects for this project. Tap on the crayon tool. Choose a size and the color white to trace an outline around the hand to make it pop off the background color.

Tap on the shape tool to add a circle and change the color to a shade of blue that will represent the oceans of the earth. Tap on the marker or crayon tool. Choose the size and color to draw in the land on the globe.   Use the marker tool to add words to create an image that will help viewers remember to Recycle, Reuse, and Reduce to help the earth.  

Sharing with an authentic audience: Students can project completed projects on the class TV to share their creations with peers. Teachers can compile completed photos into a video using iMovie to share with students and families on school based communication platforms.

Project extensions: This project could extend to other areas of social emotional posters such as ways to be a good friend, ways to be kind to others, how to lend a helping hand, and more. You could use different parts of the body to create a poster for “The Best Part of Me” with words to describe things that students like to do and qualities that they like about themselves. The opportunity for creativity with Pop Art using just a photo and Markup are limitless.

I would love to hear more ways you might integrate Pop Art with Markup into your content subjects. Do you think your students would enjoy creating with this type of project? Let me know in the comments below.