Cats! Cats!! Cats!!!

Anyone who follows me on Twitter or Instagram may be aware that I have a colony of cats out in the shed.  It is a great ice breaker as a relief teacher because it is a lot of cats.  But I also have a few books about cats and my favourite book is The Diabolical Mr Tiddles, which I have blogged about previously.  Below is the cover and back of the book.



But I always have photos of my cats on hand.  Here are some photos of some of my cats.  These ones are all brothers with the same mother cat, but they come from three different litters.

Rocket Cat - the chosen cat who actually gets to live in the house.

Crunchie Cat - he is the colour of the inside of a Crunchie Bar!

Marmite Cat - a cheeky little sod who should never be left alone with toilet paper!

I had a four day block booked with a Year 2/3 class during Term Two and this gave me  the opportunity to do writing that could be revisited and art to a high standard with this class.

To start, we read the book about Mr Tiddles and then we went and planned the writing of our stories.  Some children had their own cats to write about.  Some wrote about their grandmother's cat or their friend's cat.  Some pictured the cat they would really like to have.  We brainstormed the stories using this brainstorm sheet below which we had co-constructed the day before.

It is not often I get the chance to follow a piece of writing through from brainstorm to drafting, editing and then publishing, so I relished this opportunity and took the time to type up each child's story on completion.  I then emailed the stories to a teacher aide who was able to print them out for me.

Each day we worked on drawing cats as well.  I demonstrated how to do it on the board and the children followed me through step by step.  I demonstrated fluffy cat and short-haired cats.  I demonstrated sitting up proudly cats and lying down cats and walking cats.  I demonstrated stripy cats and cats with white chests and cats with a collamoration (is this a word?) of colours.

This is how I teach the children to draw the sitting up proudly cats.

Step 1.  Draw a triangle for the nose with curved corners.

Step 2.  Draw the 'cheeks' and mouth from the top corners.

Step 3.  Draw the eyes.  Make sure they have points at either end and the black iris in the middle.

Step 4.  I draw the ears.  They need to be above the eyes but far apart.

Step 5.  Draw the sides of the cat's face.  In this example I have done the fluffly cat.  If I was doing a short-haired cat it would have a rounded face.

Step 6.  Draw the top of the head between the ears.

Step 7. Draw in any facial features your cat may have for patterns.

Step 8.  Draw on the whiskers.

Step 9.  For the fluffy cat, draw a fluffy chest.  For short-haired cats with a white chest I draw it it.  Skip this step for a one coloured cat.

Step 10.  Draw the front legs.  Show the toes and put on the sharp claws.

Step 11.  Draw the back legs.  Remember the toes and claws.  Also draw in the body between the head and the back legs.

Step 12.  Draw the tail.  I drew a fluffy tail.  I would make smooth edges for a not fluffy cat.

Step 13.  Finally, between the front legs, put the bottom of the cat in.  After this they can put on any patterning on the body, legs and tail the children deem necessary.

After we practiced drawing cats, at least three times, I gave the students the flash cartridge paper and they drew their cats.  I asked them to draw the cat taking up most of the paper.  I did this for several reasons:

• I don't want to have to use binoculars to see the cats when they are mounted.
• They were colouring in with crayons, so I wanted them to be able to have big details rather than tiny details to colour.
• Bigger is easier to cut out.
• In the words of the big dude who used to do the advertising for Mitre 10 Mega, "Big is good!"

As you can see below, each cat is individual and each child's own work.  I think they look fabulous and they all have attention to detail when it comes to whiskers and toes and claws... and fashion accessories.

As you can see I cut out each child's story and each child's cat.  I ran out of time to glue them onto coloured paper, but when Paula came back to school, she sorted it all out and it was a pleasure to come into the class a week or so later to see the pictures and stories mounted and hanging up in the class.  The children had worked so hard.

Reading through the stories, I love how the funny little things about each cat are reflected.  The children certainly took pieces of the brainstorm to focus on for them to create a word picture of their cat.

This was a fun week and it was a pleasure to have Paula's class to do some fabulous writing and art.

Using the book The Diabolical Mr Tiddles with more classes

I love books.

 

I own A LOT of books.  Boxes and boxes and boxes of books.  Picture books.  Novels for children and young people.  Romantic fiction.  Rollicking adventure novels.  Historical Fiction.  Biographies.  Recipe books.  Art books.  More teacher resource books than you can shake a stick out.  Literally boxes and boxes and boxes and more boxes of books.  Everytime I move there are more and more books to pack.

 

I give books as gifts to every child at Christmas.  They know their present is not a box of Roses chocolates.  It is a book.

 

And I can make the same book rock for any age group in a relieving situation.  My book of choice currently is The Diabolical Mr Tiddles.  I have a lot of fun reading and we get some fabulous discussion out of talking about cats.

 

I have used this book as the basis for working on a cartoon strip with another class and blogged about it at Cartooning about diabolical animals.  I will be back with this same class later this coming week to hopefully finish these cartoons off, and to do a similar unit with another class.

 

Below is the cover and blurb for The Diabolical Mr Tiddles which was a spot on bargain buy at the Warehouse a few months ago.

 

On Tuesday I was in a Year One class with five year olds of varying levels.  Of course, they enjoyed the story and had lots of things to tell me about cats.  Being the part owner of a large cat colony out in the shed, I find children love hearing about the antics of my cats.

 

I decided we would draw cats.  I demonstrated some ways they could draw cats on the board.  We talked about how cats have eyes, noses, ears, whiskers, claws and a tail.

 

 

I showed them some photos of my cats, particularly Marmite because he is very fluffy.

 

 

And below, this is what the five year olds came up with.  I was so pleased with the detail they achieved to get all of the features of the body we discussed.

 

Of course I drew my cat Marmite while they were drawing too.

A couple of days later, at another school, I was asked to relieve in a Year 2/3 class.  As they had been doing Art Week for the School Exhibition all week, the teacher requested no art.  I was a little sad.  But no worries, because I had a cinquain poem plan that I could execute and adapt to the level.

The children were learning about verbs and adjectives... but I didn't worry about the idea of synonyms or imagery for this group.  Instead I got them to start with the animal and end with the name of the animal.

I demonstrated the writing, by talking through what we would do on each line.  I got them to start with the top and bottom line first.  The second line was describing what the animal looked like/behaved like.  The third line was three action words and the fourth was a sentence about the animal.

I also demonstrated how authors make mistakes or change their mind and rewrite parts of their writing.  I stood up and mimed Marmite when he sees me outside and the children made suggestions to help me as I wrote.

Not all the children had cats, so if they had a dog or a rabbit or a chicken I said they could write about them.  Some had no pet, so I got them to invent a pet or use a pet from another family member.

The model above was also what the children used to write their cinquain poems.  After lunch we published them.  Again I modelled this to ensure the children knew what was expected.  99% understood it. 

Below are some of the finished cinquain poems from the Year 2/3 class.  I also got them to "prettify" their poems by colouring in the borders and drawing their animal.

I think these children did a superb job of publishing and illustrating their poems and I was very impressed by them.