Read and Draw: Draw Exactly What the Sentence Says

There is no picture row on this 1st grade read-and-do page, the read-and-draw face, and that is the whole idea. Six large cards, two across and three down, each print one sentence about vehicles above an empty dashed box: Draw three small ships in the box. Draw three small bicycles in the box. Draw two small ambulances in the box. Draw four cars in a row. Draw four subways. Make them big. Draw four cranes in the box. The child reads the sentence and draws exactly what it says — the right vehicle, the right number, small or big, in a row when it says so. Every box is the same size, so the size words have to come from the reading.

Drawing from text is comprehension you can see. When a sentence says three small ships and the box shows two large ones, the teacher knows which word was skipped without asking a question. The numbers stay between two and four so counting never becomes the obstacle, and most of the vehicles are ones a first grader can sketch in outline — a car, a bicycle, a ship. The page does not ask for good drawings; it asks for the right number of the right thing, and a row of four boxes labeled car is a full answer. The teacher reads the sentence back with the child while looking at the box: three? small? ships?

Print it in black and white if you like — nothing on the page is in color and the boxes are for pencil. It is the one face of the read-and-do family with no pictures to point at, so use it last, after the base page and the true-or-false page, when the child can already act on a sentence and now has to imagine it. A write-rows or reading-comprehension page carries on from here.