Stuffed Animal Still Life Drawings with 1st Grade

Do you want to know what will really get first graders excited about drawing still lifes?  Have them bring in their own stuffed animals!  I invited the kids to bring in their favorite stuffed animals to draw.  I also had a garbage bag full of my own stuffed animals from home in case someone forgot to bring in one.

I demonstrated how to observe the shapes and positioning of the stuffed animals and then I let the kids get to work.  They each had a sheet of 12″x18″ paper and sketched their arrangement first with pencil.

Some of the kids taped their drawings together to make one large drawing and worked together to arrange their stuffed animals.

To go along with this lesson, I created a slideshow presentation with lots of examples of artists that used stuffed animals as a theme in their artwork.

This Powerpoint (also includes a PDF version of the same thing) shows artwork from several artists that have used stuffed animals as a theme in their work… including still life paintings of stuffed animals, installations, photography and sculpture.

Questions to describe and analyze accompany many of the slides.  After showing this slideshow, you can have your students draw or paint their own stuffed animal still life.

There are a total of 20 slides.  I use it with 1st graders but it could range for all of the elementary levels.

If you are interested in showing your students this stuffed animals in art presentation, visit my TPT shop!