This lesson was an interesting experiment. Before showing or telling the students what we would be working on I went around the room and we talked about “things” and “objects.” Once students had a firm grasp on the concept I asked each of them to tell me one of their favorite things and I wrote it on the back of their paper along with their name. I made sure no two students in a class had the same thing as well.
Then we switched gears and I told them we would be making superheroes. Everyone was excited. We talked about what superheros look like and made sure to discuss symbols and colors. Then I dropped the bomb. They were so excited about how they were going to be drawing Batman and Superman and boy were they wrong. They had to make a superhero that represented their “thing” from the beginning of class.
We started the drawing using Kathy Barbro’s How to draw Captain America guide. I left out some of the details to keep their hero plain and simple. Then we talked about ways to represent their ideas. Specific examples were given like “If you chose bear, but don’t know how to draw one you could draw a bear claw and use the color brown” or “Pizza is usually red, white, yellow, and brown so would it make sense to make your pizza hero purple and blue?”
The did a great job and had a lot of fun helping each other figure out what ideas worked and what didn’t.
