How to Sculpt a Cute Kiwi Bird in Plasticine, by Rob the Art Teacher

Here’s a simple and fun sculpture project for little fingers!

As my school’s only New Zealander, I was asked by one of my teaching colleagues if I could make a lesson for her 2nd graders that would complement their New Zealand focus for our school’s annual Multicultural Month. Delighted to be asked, I created this lesson about Aotearoa-New Zealand’s national bird, the flightless Kiwi. The lesson is centred around the children making their own plasticine sculpture and can be completed within a 45-minute lesson.

The lesson also included watching some delightful footage of a kiwi in the wild, listening to their calls, and beginning to learn the counting song “Ten Little Kiwi Birds” in English and Māori (“Tekau Nga Kiwi Iti E” by Itty Bitty Beats). Links to these fabulous resources are below:

PHOTOS of student work and classroom by Magda Hełminiak.

MUSIC Credits:

This video uses “Kiwi” from “Forest and Ocean” (2006), a collection of bird songs by Hirini Melbourne, sung in Māori with actual bird call backgrounds published by Viking Sevenseas Ltd. Released on 19 April 2010. https://natlib.govt.nz/records/21213921

This video uses a portion of the single “Tekau Nga Kiwi Iti E” (Ten Little Kiwi Birds) by Itty Bitty Beats.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXnk-hhA37A
FUN FACT:

“Kiwi” is the name of a bird that is native to Aotearoa-New Zealand, it is the name of a fruit, and it is also what New Zealanders call themselves.
LEARNING GOALS:

1. To be able to recognise the Kiwi (New Zealand’s national bird).

2. To understand that the word ‘Kiwi’ is also what New Zealanders’ call themselves, and it is the name of a fruit (a type of gooseberry).

3. To be able to make a small plasticine sculpture of a feeding Kiwi. Creating the bird in the feeding posture, means the bird’s beak is touching the ground. Therefore, the sculpture will stand my itself because the two legs and the beak form a kind of tripod.

4. To be able to recognise and use some or all the following keywords:
Kiwi
Flightless (the kiwi does not fly)
Nostrils (at the tip of the kiwi’s beak)
Feathers
Burrow (where the Kiwi lives, sleeps, nests)
The bush (NZ word for forest)
Feeding
Male bird
Female bird
Sculpture
Plasticine
Toothpicks
Shape
Scratch

Plus, singing in Te Reo (the [Māori] language), to learn:
Tahi, rua, toru, whā, rima, ono, whitu, waru, iwa, tekau (counting from 1 to 10 in Māori)
LINKS:

Opening scenes from "Brown Kiwi Mating Spectacle, Wild New Zealand, BBC Earth" show a kiwi at night emerging from its burrow and beginning to feed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmkUpu7_Aic

Kiwi bird calls, male and female
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZpKwxwmI5A

Hirini Melbourne singing his “Kiwi” song (waiata)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXwV2o2Ntmw

“Ten Little Kiwi Birds” (Te Reo version) “Tekau Nga Kiwi Iti E” by Itty Bitty Beats (with on-screen lyrics): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXnk-hhA37A

The Kiwi: What do we know about our national bird?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABTfc5wUT1U
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Let me know what you think, in the comments above.

You can also find me on LinkedIn: http://nz.linkedin.com/in/robgarrettcfa

Rob Garrett is an accomplished art teacher, writer, and contemporary art curator. With fine art and art history degrees from leading New Zealand Universities, he is a certified art teacher with 45 years’ experience teaching art to all ages, having worked in primary/elementary schools, high schools, and higher education art schools, including time as the Head of New Zealand’s oldest art school, the Dunedin School of Art (founded in 1870). He is currently teaching the art program at The American Elementary School in Gdynia, Poland. He has also had the honour of senior public service in New Zealand, first in a governance role as Council member with New Zealand’s national arts council ‘Creative New Zealand’, and then as the senior manager for national pan-arts development in the same organisation. His national and international work for and with artists has included initiating and administering artist residency programmes, artists’ wage/labour rights advocacy, managing New Zealand’s presence at the 2005 Venice Biennale of Contemporary Art, and curating numerous contemporary art exhibitions, public space festivals, artist commissions, and city-wide public art programs in New Zealand and Poland.

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