Learning through Play

“Children are magic. They live in a world that overspills with exploration, connections, dreams and imagination. They are trying to share this world with us all the time, because they want us to step through the door that leads there and join them.” Greg Bottrill

Drawing Club Drawing Club is an approach designed by Greg Bottrill that immerses children into a world full of imagination. We at All Saints' fully embrace drawing club and can see the joy it brings to our children. It is through drawing club that we open up the magic world of tales and story to children whilst at the same time enriching their language skills, developing their fine motor and share a really special time with them. Drawing Club is a fantastic place to start a child’s experience of school ‘Literacy’.

Drawing Club is based upon the 3M principle. These are making conversation, mark making and mathematics. We use a book, traditional tale or an animation as a portal for the week. Children learn new, exciting vocabulary that we revisit each day of the week. We draw characters on a Monday, settings on a Tuesday and we ‘wonder’ on a Thursday and Friday.

We add maths to our drawings by talking about shapes, doubling, halving, addition, subtraction etc… For example, after reading the story The Three Billy Goats Gruff...  We might be drawing a troll with a spherical shaped head, 2 strong, wiry hairs on his chin and double this amount coming out of each ear. He has one more than 4 buttons on his filthy, ripped shirt. Children observe as the teacher models drawing club each morning and then get the opportunity to complete their own drawings. They can borrow ideas from the teacher or create their own amazing ideas to share. One of the most exciting parts of Drawing Club is adding secret symbols and passwords to our drawings. We always draw a secret symbol that can make anything happen! Sometimes we press them and aliens or unicorns become 3 times bigger, pencils turn into chocolate or hair turns multi-coloured! We then add a password to make the secret symbol work. This can be a mark, letter, digraph (2 letters that make one sound), a word or a sentence. As children make progress and become more confident with their phonics, their passwords develop and move towards phrases and sentences.