Altering and Marking

Students make alterations to a line drawing (colouring, adding items) in response to the teacher's spoken instructions.

Procedure

1. Give each student a line drawing with plenty of people and objects in it (a street scene, classroom, park, etc.).
2. Tell students to colour parts of the picture according to your instructions. Speak slowly with plenty of repetition and pauses to give time for drawing. For example: There are flowers on the table. They're red, and they're standing in a black vase. Got that? The vase is black all over, and the flowers are red.
3. Then tell students to take a pencil and add things to the picture. For example: Can you see a little baby in the picture? OK, I want you to draw a hat on the baby's head. OK? A hat on the baby.
4. Continue with more instructions, mixing colouring and adding new items.

Tips

• Include lots of redundancy in your instructions -- pauses, repetition, paraphrases -- to give students time to draw.
• For beginners, use a page of letters instead: The A is blue, the M is red, or There's a butterfly sitting on the G.
• Can be turned into a pair activity: students give similar instructions to each other.