Squaredy Squirrel Directed Drawing...Yes You Can! I'll Teach You!

Happy Teacher Appreciation Week!!

Drawing is one of my passions... I don't know what I'd do without having this hobby in my life.  It's calming to me and one of the ways I can express myself freely.  Drawing is a great way to build confidence within your students, build motor skills, and help them to give more details in their writing!  

One way to bring drawing into your classroom, especially if you can't draw, is to do Directed Drawing lessons.  These are drawing lessons, broken down into very easy steps.  These allow all your students to be successful, and it makes you look like Picasso!

So let's give it a try!  I'll give you a second to go get a pencil and paper...

Ok, here we go!

The first step is to draw the ears and the top of the head.  But if you're doing a directed drawing lesson with your kids, I would say this:  

"Ok, let's start with the head.  To draw the ears, first draw two hills.  Then connect them with a frown."

If you just tell the kids to draw two ears and the top of the head, you may get something that doesn't even look like this, but still may look two ears and a head.  Wording it like that just makes it more visual and auditory for your kids, especially those that learn like that.

For the rest of the directions, I'll word it as I would with my students.

The second step is to draw the entire head.  Now watch me first. (You draw the head on board or projector, as students watch.)  To draw this, you'll make two half circles, one on each side of the face.  Make sure to pay attention to how you draw the chin!  The chin should look like a small happy face.

For step 3, we're going to add 3 parts to the squirrel's head.  Let's start with the ears.  You're going to draw 2 L shapes; one of them will be backwards.  The second thing we'll draw is the eyes.  Notice that the eyes are really far apart and almost touch the outside of the head.  Don't forget the eyebrows, which look like two frowns!  And finally, the nose.  This is a unique shape. (I wouldn't try to describe this.  I usually draw it and make some silly sound.  For some reason, this helps the kids.  After I do that, you will hear 20 of the same silly sounds while they're drawing it on their own paper!)

The next step is to draw the teeth.  His teeth are a bunch of little rectangles, touching each other.  But instead of drawing each rectangle, lets draw the big one on the outside first.  Now let's go back inside his mouth and draw straight lines down to make the teeth.

(I was using this for a product, that's why it's white;)  Ok, now let's color in a thin rectangle on each side of his mouth and color them in black.  Then you'll make a frown, hill, frown over his nose.  Watch me do it... Frown, hill, frown.  Now you try!

The last step is to color it in.  You'll only be using four colors really... Brown, tan, black and pink.  But you may color it how you wish!

Ok, now I'm back;)  See, look at your own drawing...  It's pretty good right?  I told you I could teach you how to draw!  

I've put the steps to make Scaredy Squirrel together on a printable for you!  If you'd like this FREEBIE, click on the printable below.

Click on the picture above to access this directed drawing FREEBIE!  

Once again, Happy Teacher's Appreciation to you and thanks for all you do! I'd love to hear how you like the Scaredy Squirrel directed drawing or any other comments you have!  Make sure to leave me some love in the comment section below;)

Until Next Time,