My Drawing Class at Classical Conversations

The first three weeks of school went by so fast! I'm finally sitting down to take a breath and give a recap of what my students have been learning in my drawing class for 5-8 year olds, at our Classical Conversations class days.   

Week 1 & 2: 
Students learned and memorized the definition of a LINE: 
"A line is a mark, made by a tool that represents the outline edges of an object, shape, surface, shadow or color."
We looked at examples of different types of lines and copied them--straight, curved, zig zag, angled, dashed, dotted, and spiral--and line directions: vertical, horizontal and diagonal.

Next, I introduced a hand-eye coordination warm up exercise called "Perceiving Contour Lines":​

First, students traced one of the lines with a dry erase marker, after the page was placed into a page protector. 

Then they copied the line "Blind" by placing a blinder (made from a half sheet of copy paper) over their drawing hand and pencil so they couldn't see what they were drawing. This exercise helps to strengthen their observation skills as they concentrate and stare at the line while drawing it with their hand. Here's a couple of my students demonstrating this exercise:

Our drawing projects were an ice cream cone, on week 1, and an apple, on week 2. We used the same Trace & Blind Contour technique as described above. The students had a photograph and an outline to trace over and draw from each object. Here is what my Blind Contour drawings looked like:

They drew the object one last time, on nicer drawing paper, without the blinder. Then they colored them. Here are mine. (I forgot to snap photos of the kids these two weeks.)

I expressed to my students that this drawing technique is the most important skill for anyone to learn in order to draw accurately from observation.
Most people don't know how to draw from observation and so they think that only those endowed with a gift from God are meant to be artists. This is NOT true! Learning how to draw is a skill that anyone can learn, just like learning a sport or a musical instrument.  
​Here's a FREE download of the "Perceiving Contour Line Practice Page" for you to try at home.

perceiving_contour_line_practice_page.pdf
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Here are a few art books we read that complimented the beginning of our year of practicing art together.