Directed Drawing on Seesaw

When I saw this on Pinterest, I fell in love with the adorable school bus directed drawing activity by Proud to be Primary. 

It occurred to me that a directed drawing activity like this one would be a perfect way to introduce the Seesaw drawing tool to students! By giving them step by step directions, I could ensure they were using all of the features in the drawing tool and seeing how they could create something amazing! We created these little beauties in Mr. Anderson's first grade today. 

Keep reading to  learn more.

While you could begin with step 1 of the directed drawing directions, Mrs. Risser (who made the paper version of these in her classroom and they are ADORABLE) suggested that a template for the "body" of the bus was helpful to her first graders. She shared this template with me, and I was able to upload it to Seesaw and send to all of the students in Mr. Anderson's class. CLICK HERE to learn how to send assignments to your students.

In order for the first graders to be able to open the template I sent them, then add details and make this drawing their own, I needed to be sure that "enable item editing" was turned on in the Seesaw class settings. Learn how to do that HERE. To access the template, students had to first find the "feed view" of their class.

Students then need to click the three magical little dots under the post:

And select "copy and edit":

They will then choose their own name, and Seesaw will generate them their own copy to work on. It is very helpful during this part to be sure you are projecting your iPad onto a screen so students can watch what you're doing, and go step by step together. Once they have completed these steps and made their own copy, they will choose the pencil tool to draw on the template.

At this point, I followed the directed drawing instructions, except I put them in a bit different order. We did some of the lines for the eyes and windshield, then we colored the school bus yellow. We then added the rest of the details and colors. I didn't tell the students what they were making, and it was really fun to hear their guesses about what it was going to become! They did a fantastic job of following the instructions. This was a great lesson to practice listening and following directions!

Once the drawings were complete, the students clicked the green check mark and used the Seesaw typing tool to type a sentence. It would be great to brainstorm writing ideas together whole class and have students draft their writing beforehand, then type the finished writing into Seesaw. When the writing is finished, they click the green checkmark and the item will automatically upload since they already selected their names. This part confused some of them!

They turned out great and it was a fantastic way to practice using the drawing tool in Seesaw. Any directed drawing activities would be a wonderful way to introduce or practice using this tool!

(This one is great - I love auto correct. LOL)