Drawing Club

Drawing Club is an approach designed by Greg Bottrill that immerses children into a world full of imagination. We have embraced drawing club and can see the joy it brings to the children. It is through drawing club that we open up the magic world of tales and story to children whilst at the same time enriching their language skills, developing their fine motor and share a really special time with them. Drawing Club is a fantastic place to start a child’s experience of school ‘Literacy’.  

Each week we follow a similar pattern which is shown below;

Drawing Club is based upon the 3M principle. These are making conversation, mark making and mathematics. We use a book, traditional tale or an animation as a portal for the week.

Every day we have vocabulary time where we learn new words associated with our story of the week which stretches their vocabulary beyond the story. We then read our story twice, on Monday and Tuesday so that the children become familiar with the story if they haven`t heard it before. The next part of the session includes the drawing where we take an element of the book and draw something based on the days focus.

For example, Monday is a character based session so we look at the character in the story and draw our own version of that character. One of the most exciting parts of Drawing Club is adding secret symbols and passwords to our drawings. We always draw a secret symbol that can make anything happen! Sometimes we press them and aliens or unicorns become 3 times bigger, pencils turn into chocolate or hair turns multi-coloured! We then add a password to make the secret symbol work. This can be a mark, letter, digraph (2 letters that make one sound), a word or a sentence. As children make progress and become more confident with their phonics, their passwords develop and move towards phrases and sentences.  

The Adventure Time: I wonder... sessions towards the end of the week are where we imagine what might happen if we got to choose an element of the story. An example of these questions and how we discuss the story during Adventure Time is shown below using the text - The Three Billy Goats Gruff.