To Draw or Not to Draw.....

There is going to be a lot of drawing involved in Animal Worlds. I don't mind drawing, and Annabelle doesn't mind drawing. However, she is a perfectionist at heart and does not do well with open ended drawing.
Example:
Me: Annabelle, draw a horse.
Annabelle: I don't know how to draw a horse....
Me: Well, how about if we just try to draw a horse.
Annabelle: A) I don't want to draw a horse. OR B) I will try to draw a horse. (There is no scientific reasoning that these two answers are completely opposite from each other. It is just who Annabelle is. lol)
If option B was chosen and said horse doesn't turn out perfect, mass hysteria is bound to ensue.

She would much rather have a picture or something to look at to draw from. I do not want this conversation to happen every other day. Also, I do not want to discourage her and want to follow her learning cues. Here is the solution I've come up with.

Here is the blank page that would cause the previous conversation to happen. Underneath the title it instructs the student to draw pictures of animals and plants that they know would already live in the Savannah. This would freak Annabelle out. So we did the activity in two steps (for her).

Step 1) Annabelle lists the animals and plants that she knows are found in the Savannah.
Step 2) I print out clip art of the animals/plants and draw outlines around them so Annabelle knows where to cut.
Step 3) Cut and paste onto the blank page.
Finished product.
I'm hoping that substituting activities like this for some of the drawing activities will keep Annabelle motivated and in a good mood when she actually will be drawing.

Another solution that I have come up with to this 'situation' is to let her use my camera. She loves to take pictures and they are easy enough to just print out like clip art. That is a method that we will probably be using a lot this year. Instead of having her draw what she sees on our explorations she will be taking pictures of what she sees.

That's it for this post. Happy blogging. :)
jess_hak

I am linking this up to Preschool Corner. :)