What do Mr. Potato Head and Writing have in common?

The answer to this would be details, details, details.  For the past couple of weeks we have been talking about adding details to our writing.  We have done many lessons from Katie Wood Rays book In Pictures and In Words.  This lesson was adopted from Toying with Writing by Nancy Herta. She has some awesome ideas for teaching writing. All of her lessons have a toy that help kids remember the skill.

We started with a very plain potato and talked about what details we could add.

They started by wanting to add feet.  I let them choose what pair of feet they wanted to add.

Then they added a hat and eyes.

In the end we added a mouth and some arms.

We made a couple of other Mr./Mrs. Potato Heads.

When we were done we talked about when we draw pictures of people we need to make sure we draw eyes, hands, a mouth, feet and clothing. This lesson really stuck.  So many kiddos were drawing people with tons of details.