Since we home school and run a blog, we were selected to review a product called “Pick and Draw.”
It comes with a deck of cards giving pictures covering the various parts that make a person’s head and a book to guide what to do with it. All of the suggestions are good but variety is the spice of life and Pick and Draw has proven to be a versatile tool depending on how you use it.
The instructions have one select a shape of a face, nose, eyes, mouth, and hair. From those selections you draw a cartoonish character’s head. You can name them and fill out their personalities. Then the sky is the limit in the options one does with them.
For us, this straight-forward product has found its way into our curriculum to be used with all ages at the same time. I shall paint the picture for you to follow.
My three girls sit down with an adult supervising. My 12-yr-old runs the show and guides the 2-yr-old to pick the cards for her to draw a face from. My 3-yr-old then names each character and answers the questions to give the character a personality. Obviously, my eldest is recording this information. From there, it goes into a couple of different paths. They sometimes each take a character and pretend they are them doing some activity such as going on a picnic. But we observed what they were doing and decided to take it to a different level.
Some say ‘variety is the spice of life’ and it does hold true in home schooling. You have to mix it up to keep the kids on task. So how did we factor this into the curriculum?
Using the same steps as above, we added a couple of twists to it to make it fit the categories of Art and Creative Writing. The characters and their personalities are created as stated above. But we threw a twist to our eldest. Her grandparents would create a list of settings and activities before knowing what the characters were. My eldest is given a weekly challenge of taking the random characters with random personalities and putting them together with the random list of settings and activities to generate a story using all of the factors together.
Does that sound like an easy task to do? It isn’t since she has to merge ideas of grandparents with the goofiness of her sisters into a story that makes sense. It does help her creative writing improve rapidly. It also is a load of fun for her and her sisters.
The tool takes no position on values so you can use it however you will. In our opinion, it is a great addition to the options of the home school setting.
Thank you,
Anah
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