Draw a Frog at the Pond

The paper on this page is already a picture. A cloud and a sun sit in the sky, a tulip grows on the bank, and the pond in the middle is empty. Across the top, four numbered steps show how to draw a frog, outline first and then the eyes, legs and spots with each step's new lines in orange. The child practises the frog from the steps and then draws it on the empty pond, so the finished page is a scene rather than an animal floating on white paper. This is the grade-1 scene page of the how-to-draw family.

Placing a drawing inside a picture asks for a decision the plain pages do not: how big should the frog be, and where exactly does it sit on the pond? Children who can draw an animal often cannot yet place it, and a prepared scene with one obvious empty place teaches that placement without words. The sun, cloud and tulip also give the frog a scale to match.

Print it on plain paper; nothing is marked. The props are drawn from the same picture library as the find-the-differences pond pages, so the frog page and those pages can sit in one lesson. The base page of the family gives an empty paper instead of a scene. The child draws the animal from its own steps; letter tracing, grid-copy pixels and symmetry drawing have their own pages.