An idea I want to try

I have been wishing for Karla Cikanova's book 'Teaching Children to Draw' for a long time. I am a big fan of her book 'Teaching Mixed Media to Children', but her books on painting and drawing have been out of print, and I couldn't find them at prices I could afford. Last week, there was a cheap used copy on Amazon, so I got it! The first thing I noticed while looking through the book was this nifty idea, which will be great for the Sabot preschool with all of the thinking going on about birds.

The idea is to have children make rubbings, prints or drawings of feathers in order to see and notice things about them, and then, to think about and use the feather shapes while drawing a bird. 

It seems to me that this would be valuable in helping children think about parts of a whole, drawing the texture of a bird, and learning about how birds are put together.

Here are a couple of feather drawings by Acadia and Nolan. I haven't gotten to the part about drawing a whole bird yet, but I am excited to try.