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!!!

Little Poets Get Published

April: Poetry Month!! 

This blog post is a continuation of my Making Little Poets blog that I posted at Pre-K and K Sharing last week. 

 

In that blog we were in the process of working together, as a class, to write our very own poem. I wanted my students to understand that it takes a lot of hard work, editing and re-writing to get  a book or poem published. So we talk about the steps that they take to do this.

 

Here are the steps we took in writing a class poem (for more detail, please read my blog Making Little Poets)

Day 1: Brainstorming

Students brainstorm topics that they wanted our class poem to be about.

 

Day 2: Getting Started 

Start writing the poem...come up with the first sentence and edit along the way if need be.

 

                               

  Day 3: Continue/finish writing rough draft and begin editing 

 Read over what has already been written and continue to write the poem until it is finished.  As a rule of thumb, I like to keep the poems to 10 lines or less (mainly because I want it to fit in a pocket chart once it is written out on sentence strips but also because I want to wrap it up in 5 days otherwise the kiddos start to lose interest).

Day 4: Edit and re-write

Read the poem and decide what changes need to be made. Then re-write the poem and re-read it again to make sure it is just how we want it :) Thursday, we read through our poem to see if the students liked the way it sounded. As we read it, we talked about the beat or the rhythm that  poems can have. This made the students look at the poem in a whole new light and also made them want to change a couple things and make the poem a little longer. 

At the beginning of Thursday's lesson, this is what our Poem looked like:

Kindergarten Friends
My friends are really cool!
We play together outside.
We see each other at school.
Some are girls and some are boys.
We eat together at lunch,
We like to play with our toys.
My friends are really cool!  

By the end of the the lesson our poem became a little longer and read like this:

Kindergarten Friends
My friends are really cool!
We play together outside.
We see each other at school.
Some are girls and some are boys.
We eat together at lunch,
We like to play with our toys.
We sit together and read.
Walking straight down the hallway,
We like to be in the lead.   

 Day 5: Final Copy

Thursday night, I typed up the final copy to share with the students on the Smart Board. On Friday, I pulled up the poem on the Smart Board and we read it together. After we read it, one of my students brought up the fact that they didn't like the sentence "walking straight down the hallway" because it sounded funny. I agreed, so we tried to figure out how to change it so that the rythm of the poem made a little more sense. By changing one word, the poem sounded better. We made the change, wrote the poem out on sentence strips and put it in the pocket chart to work on next week before my students perform it! We didn't put the poem in our PIG folders yet, because I wanted my students to know the poem better before putting it in their PIG folders to take home and read to their families. 

So here is our final copy that is officially "published" in our classroom collection of poems! 

Kindergarten Friends
My friends are really cool!
We play together outside.
We see each other at school.
Some are girls and some are boys.
We eat together at lunch,
We like to play with our toys.
We sit together and read.
Walking straight down the hall,
We like to be in the lead.  

~Mrs. Ramirez's Kindergarten Class 

 

Presentation Day:

This week, on Friday, we have our Poetry Celebration Assembly and my students will be able to recite the poem, written by them, in front of their peers! 

This weeks poetry agenda includes List Poems! By the end of the week, my students will be writing their own list poems and having them published in our very own Poetry Anthology Book! Although this year I am doing it a little different, to see how I teach List Poems check out my We Love Poetry! Or to see how I do poetry throughout the school year, click here! 

If you have any questions about how I did this or how I teach poetry in my classroom, please feel free to ask!