As usual, I received an email this week with the TeachingEnglish newsletter.

As I read through the summaries of the featured content from the TeachingEnglish website, two things immediately caught my eye.

http://www.walls-hd.com/

The first is a video tip explaining how to draw animals on the board.

http://fairydustteaching.blogspot.com.es/

Paul Millard explains (without speaking!) how despite failing his school art exam at 16,

Paul shows us how to draw animals and how changing the size and/or shape of the body especially, we can use similar forms to draw different animals.

Now I don't know about you, but I am reluctant to draw on the board except for some animals like sheep, fish and pigs.  I have these three animals well-rehearsed.  Like Paul, I use a cloud to draw a sheep.  I'm sure if I watch Paul's video a few more times, pausing it to copy his shapes and techniques, I could expand my repertoire!

Looking around the web after watching Paul's video, I came across a couple of useful resources to share with you:

At http://www.meddybemps.com/letterary/letterzoo.html, you can see how to use letters to build 4 animals.  The letters needed to put together a cat, snail, bird and caterpillar are provided.  Students could then produce their own 'letter animals'.

And on the Harptoons site, you can learn to draw lots of animals using letters and numbers.

Let's see if this summer I can find the time to doodle and practise drawing and develop my board drawing skills!