Order the Steps: Drawing an Owl

Five cards show an owl at five stages of being drawn, and they are printed in the wrong order. Beside each card is an empty box. The child works out which card comes first, which next, and writes 1 to 5 in the boxes before drawing the owl on the paper below. The clue is in the colours: on every card the lines already drawn are black and the lines just added are orange, so the card whose orange lines are black on another card comes before it. This grade-1 page is the ordering page of the how-to-draw family.

Putting steps in order is sequencing, the same thinking as ordering the frames of a story, applied to a drawing procedure. The first and last cards are easy to spot, the all-orange outline and the finished owl, and the three in the middle need the comparison the colours make possible. A child who has ordered the cards has understood why the steps go that way, which is more than copying them.

Print it on plain paper; the finished owl on the last card is the check, every line it shows must have come in order, and the drawing is not marked. The child draws the animal from its own steps; story sequencing pages, letter tracing and grid-copy pixels have pages of their own.