Draw a Dinosaur with the Grid

A dinosaur stands on a four-by-four grid at the top left of this page. Beside it is an empty grid of the same size, and below both is a plain dashed box. The child copies the dinosaur into the empty grid one square at a time, looking at where the lines cross each square, and then draws it once more in the box without any grid. The grid is a drawing aid, not a pixel puzzle: lines, not filled squares, which is what separates this grade-1 page from the grid-copy pages.

Working square by square breaks a hard drawing into sixteen easy ones and teaches a child to look at position: the head is in the top left square, the tail reaches the right edge in the third row. The second drawing, without the grid, is where that looking pays off, because the child now knows the dinosaur's proportions from having measured them.

Print it on plain paper; nothing is marked, and the plain box is intentionally about the size of the grid so the second dinosaur can match the first. The base page of the how-to-draw family uses numbered steps instead of a grid. The child draws the animal from its own steps or squares; grid-copy pixel pictures, letter tracing and symmetry drawing have their own pages.