Thematic Teacher
Educational Materials for Literacy Through Art, Science, and Social Studies.
I usually liked to have my students make their own diorama backgrounds, but sometimes the effort is best spent on creating the display rather than the background. In that case, these ten clip art landscape backgrounds may be helpful. Each background comes in four pieces—left side, back, right side, and ground. The images are formatted to fit a shoe box, but may be stretched to fit any size box, as long as your printer can print the size needed. These landscapes have been used in shoe boxes up to 14” wide, when printed on legal sized paper. They are saved at the size of 14” wide, 7” high, and 6” deep, at 150 dpi so that they will be sharp and crisp at large sizes, even when stretched.
Printing a background for each student at a standard printer setting requires a lot of ink, but the clip art looks good on most printers when printed at a draft or fast mode. The sample shoe boxes in the display images and in the preview were printed this way. It saves LOTS of time and ink!
The landscapes included in this package include:
- Autumn Woods
- Desert
- Forest Clearing
- Meadow Pond
- Mountain Lake
- Ocean Dunes
- Prairie Grass
- Salt Marsh
- Snowy Hill
- Stockade
Directions are also included for using Microsoft ™ Publisher to resize each piece to fit a specific sized box. Publisher is a great formatting program, and most school districts have a license for the software. If you don’t have it on your computer, your IT person can probably get it for you. The directions are mainly for your information, but they may be used with older students to walk them through the process.
If you are looking for images of plants and animals that students may use to enhance their dioramas, you might check out Natural Resources Magnetic & Flannel Board Printable. It’s free, and although it’s not clip art (so not easily resized), students can cut off the black or white bubbles on the outside of the picture, fold a section of the bottom part under, and glue it on the diorama “ground” to make a free-standing figure.
Use these high resolution (150 dpi) clip art pieces to help your students build colorful dioramas using shoe boxes. If you are a teacher author, sharing and/or selling teacher-to-teacher on sites like Teachers Pay Teachers, you may use the clip art to create materials to sell for those specific types of commercial purposes.
CLIP ART TERMS OF USE
This clip art was created to help teachers prepare classroom materials for their own private use, and to place on products created and sold by individual educators directly to other educators. Purchase of this collection gives you a single user license. Please do not redistribute, sell or resell “as is”, or as a part of any clip art collection. The images should not be the primary purpose of your product, but may be used to enhance it. They must be flattened to the page, such as on a PDF document. They may be used
To decorate your classroom, including bulletin boards
In educational materials you (an individual) create for your own personal use, to give away, or to sell directly to other teachers, provided the images are securely flattened to the page, as in a PDF document
For communication within the context of the school site such as on printed letters or forms to parents or colleagues
To create gifts for school employees or classroom volunteers (credit must be given for this purpose)
Credit is appreciated, but not required (except as stated above):
Clip Art provided by ThematicTeacher.com
or use the included Clip Art Credit button.
I retain the copyrights to these images.
If you have any questions, contact me at sflynn@thematicteacher.com