Copy Each Step: Draw a Bird

Every step on this page has its own box. Four cards across the top show a hummingbird growing from its outline to its wings and feathers, and directly under each card is an empty box the same size, so the child copies step 1, then step 2 with its new lines added, and so on. The bigger paper at the bottom is for the whole bird, drawn larger once all four steps have been practised. The grade-1 how-to-draw page that gives the most guided practice is this one.

Copying each step separately makes the child draw the outline four times and the added lines in order, which fixes the sequence far better than looking at the steps once and drawing the finished bird. The small boxes keep each attempt short; the large paper at the end asks for the same drawing at a new size, which tests whether the proportions have been learned rather than traced by eye.

Print it on plain paper; nothing is marked. The animal is a hummingbird, named bird on the page because that is the word a child uses for it. The base page of the family shows the same kind of steps with one big paper only. The child draws the animal from its own steps; letter tracing, grid-copy pixels and symmetry drawing have their own pages.