Understading Fairytales

Esperanza Charter School

1st grade, Visual Art & ELA

Ms. Andrea / Ms. Morales and Ms. Small

In our First Grade ELA/Visual Art classes, we used drawing and painting to deepen our understanding of fairy tales. Throughout the spring we read many fairy tales, noting the elements they shared: many were about royalty, featured magic, had villains, started with “Once upon a time,” and had happy endings.

To demonstrate our understanding of The Frog Prince, we drew side-by-side portraits: one of a frog, one of a prince. Having drawn comics throughout the school year, when we see sequential images, we see a story. By adding crowns to each portrait, we transformed our drawings from two, unrelated portraits to a narrative of the shape-shifting title character.

We used watercolors to ink our two-panel comics. We paid special attention to which parts of the face (both frog and human) to highlight and shade, and we practiced layering colors without them bleeding together. Our art turned out amazingly!