Thing 1 and Thing 2 Guided Drawing Project

A couple years ago, I was goofing around and did a "fly by the seat of my pants" hand print activity. I had the kiddo's trace their hands and then at that moment, caught a glimpse of my "Thing 2" classroom pointer. This game me a great idea! From this point on, I was going to make it a guided drawing lesson.

I had the children write a C in each of their hand prints then  draw a backward C next to it. Next, make a big black dot in each of the C's. ...The list went on and then at the very end, I had them draw their traced fingers blue. And all of the sudden, THING 1 and THING 2 came to life for them! They were so thrilled that they just drew a Dr. Seuss character...or should I say characters with an S since there were two of them! This is what the final product looked like!

This year, many of my colleagues used the Art series that we use to make The Cat in the Hat but I wanted to do something different. So again, I put on my thinking cap and went to work. How could I make this a guided drawing lesson so that these little fellas ACTUALLY look like Thing 1 and Thing 2. There was no better way to try than to just go for it...if they turned out horrible...well, we could try again.
So, again, I began with hand prints for the head. I reminded students that what ever we did on one hand print, we would do to the other. Next I  made sure we had a neck and a round-oval shaped body. The legs we wrote the letter L and then wrote another one next to it and closed it up. Then a backward L for the next leg and repeated the process. The arms were done very similar to the legs. This time I told students to draw a straight line out then a short line down. Then close them up. One of the students said "hey, that is a side-ways L"! So, we drew a side-ways L on the other side and closed it up.

Then we started to color their hair...AKA the students' fingers...

After coloring their hair, I realized that I almost forgot to draw the circles on their bellies!!! So, we stopped and drew a circle in the center of their bellies and wrote Thing 1 and Thing 2! 

 

Last but not least...I had students color the bodies red and then had them trace over the facial features with a black crayon. Then VIOLA...they turned out like THIS!!!!

 So, for trying a guided drawing lesson from scratch, I thought they turned out pretty good if I don't say so myself! 

You can pick up the directions at my TpT store! Just click the picture above!!!

Have a Seusstastic Weekend!!!

Silly Rhyme Writing in Kindergarten

I am always looking for new ways to involve writing in the classroom. This year, the students in our team have been struggling with rhyming. They are just so inconsistent. Right when we think they have it, they don't! So I decided to work on writing and rhyming at the same time. I dug through my tub of rhyming books and found one of my favorites titled Cat is Back at Bat by John Stadler. 

 

The book is full of silly animal rhymes. Each page holds it's own rhyme and illustration for that rhyme. After reading the book through once, we went back through and talked about the word family/rime that was used on each page. We did this to review why words rhyme!

The next day, we focused on a certain word family/rime and wrote out the words that students built in the winter word family book we used from Debi Goodman. I chose to use these books because then we wouldn't have too many words to choose from when making our rhyme, otherwise it becomes too much for the kiddos.

Once we came up with our list, the students worked together to come up with a silly rhyme. This process was repeated daily for 7 days (on the last day, we did two rhymes). This resulted in eight silly rhymes, thus eight pages to a class book. We titled our book "Stop and Hop," Said the Mop. The title came from one of the pages in the book that we wrote just like in the book Cat is Back at Bat. 

Below you will see the cover of the book.

Here is some of the students' work and a few of the pages included in the book we wrote together. 

 On the final day, I stapled the books together and sent them home with each child. The kiddos were very excited to get a book, written by them, to take home to read to their family! They are officially author's of a Kindergarten Published book! 

If you have fun writing activities to share, leave me a comment! I would love to hear from you! 

This week we are celebrating Dr. Seuss! I will have a guided drawing activity up soon! On that note...I need to get going on my outfit tomorrow!! It is Wacky Wednesday...MY FAVORITE DAY OF THE WHOLE YEAR!!!!