Fables and Morals

As I mentioned at the end of my last post, Mrs. Black and I decided to focus on fables for my last two visits. Today I went in to the class prepared to help them get started on creating their own fable with a moral and have them design the cover or illustration that would go with that fable.
I started the class by introducing the idea of genres and had the class participate in telling me what a genre was. Once we had established that, I transitioned to our focus of fables. I asked if any students were familiar with some fables. One student responded with the Ugly Duckling.
I had brought a book of fables with me, Fables by Arnold Lobel. I used this to help illustrate some of the characteristics of a fable to lay the ground work for when they would need to make up their own. Using the fable The Baboon's Umbrella as an example from the book, we discussed how fables use animals as the main characters, they teach a moral, and the animals often have human qualities.
I had made copies of the fable along with it's illustration for each of the students. We read the fable together and then discussed how it exemplified the characteristics of a fable.
During discussion times, I would ask the students to raise their hands and then call on them when they had done so. The whole class participated very well and we interested in the fable and the topic at hand. Once the discussion was over, I moved on to what they were going to be doing for next week.
The assignment is to draw an illustration of their own fable which should include a moral and have a list of the character(s) in their fable. Part of what Mrs. Black had wanted for me to do with this lesson was show them how to draw some animals and have them follow along as I did so. This is why we chose to have this lesson be on fables, so that the students could draw animals.
After introducing their task of drawing an illustration and the written portion of their work, I had them get out some paper and a pencil so that I could walk them through how to draw some cartoon animals they could then expound on to create their own illustrations. I used by animation book Cartoon Animation by Preston Blair as a reference to help me in this process.
In the book, there are some "how to" sections on drawing heads, animals, and other such things for cartoon characters. I started by picking the portion on a rabbit's head and a bear cub's head and walked them through how to draw those. The class was very excited because they love to draw and some of them were very good at following along and were quite pleased with their results. There were others that had some difficulty, but they still had fun. It became a little rowdy during this process, especially between animals, but Mrs. Black and I were able to get them to settle back down using her hand clapping rhythm that she uses with them.
After finishing those two drawings, we had time to start one last drawing, so I chose to show them how to draw the entire body of an animal with human characteristics. Earlier, we had learned the word for this, which is anthropomorphism. There were several animals from the book that I could choose from, but since we could only do one, I wrote down five options and had the students vote on which one they wanted to learn how to draw. They chose a crocodile.
We began the crocodile drawing, but only got half-way done when the bell for recess sounded. We dismissed the class and told them we would finish next week.
I plan to finish that crocodile drawing next week and then have the students work on their fable, moral, and illustration. Depending on how much time we have, I may be able to walk them through a few more cartoon animal drawings.
This lesson was a lot less intense than the last few weeks. It ran smoothly and I believe that the students all learned from it as well as enjoyed themselves.