If you are of a certain age level you most probably recognize that tag line from the famous Mr. Ed.

But a horse is a horse of course and quite difficult to draw.

It really is amazing that my small group of 7-9 yr olds are really able to copy lots of these images. This activity concentrated on a carousel horse as shown below. Mona Brooks showed a finished carousel horse and a bare bones one

I chose to hone in on the bottom one and the kids chose to make real horses as opposed to carousel horses.

It’s really interesting how things develop. Usually I have been following Mona’s directions by drawing on the marker board and having the kids copy me.

This time they asked me for copies of the picture so they could copy it. I gave them each one and worked much better like that.

This leads me to believe that they are not necessarily following the shape alphabet as much as Mona describes in her book but just plain copying.

Which bring me to another interesting thought.

As a child I did lots of copying from pictures. Whenever my mother complimented me I poo poohed it saying : “It’s only copying”.

It’s  only from going through Mona’s book that I realized how much drawing is based on copying.

I was so affected by my progressive Bank Street training that it is still a bit hard for me to accept the fact that ones needs to learn to coy well in order to learn how to draw.

These 2 images of horses are just some basic copies the kids were able to make right off the bat.

The little girl who made the horse above was having a very difficult time and I worked with her individually. she could not get the leg on the right to the right proportion and it wasn’t until I was trying to sleep one night when I remembered that I should have given her guiding dots to use. Told her to show me where she wanted the leg to end, make a dot there and then bring it down.

I’ll have to remember that for next time.

The child that made the horse jumping over the fence made a mistake behind the horse and used a techniques we had learned about creating something out of mistakes to make what she said was another horse.

The image on the left above was made because this child did not want to bother creating a whole scene for her horse, so she made a grid, colored it n and then said “I know I’m adding  a horn an wings” and made a unicorn.

All in all quite interesting to see how they can really follow what seems at first glance a difficult project.