Pi Day Printable Art Activity from Drawings Of...

Yesterday morning I shared some physical education activities for Pi Day along with some video lessons for Pi Day. Today, I have another Pi Day resource to share with you. This one comes from Lillie Marshall's Drawings Of... website that I reviewed a couple of months ago. 

On Drawings Of... Lillie Marshall is offering three free printable coloring pages for Pi Day. The first is a visual explanation from the "Pi Queen" and the other two are sheets of little pi-themed cards that students can color and give to each other. Get the Pi Day printables here. 

On a related note, Calculating Pi With Real Pies is probably my favorite video for Pi Day. The video is embedded below. 

Free Shapegrams from Tony Vincent!

I've known Tony Vincent for at least a dozen years. In all that time he's always had awesome graphics on his website and in his presentations. So when he recently reached out to tell me about his new page of free Shapegrams, I knew I had to share it with all of you. 

Shapegrams are digital drawings creating by using the drawing tools, shapes, and fill tools available in Google Slides and Google Drawings. On his free Shapegrams page Tony offers directions and templates for making a house, a face, an ice cream cone, and a lion. But I noticed that once I started looking into the templates I got more ideas for making neat things with the Shapegrams model. 

Watch this video for an overview of how to use the Shapegrams model to create a house. And if you like Dad Jokes, you're going to love Tony's introduction to the lesson. 

Applications for Education
Students can use the Shapegrams model to create a set of slides to tell a story or to simply serve as the backdrop for a story. If you use the transitions and animations tools in Google Slides, you could make your Shapegrams move as a part of a simple animated story.

How to Spell "No One" and Other Fun Lessons from Drawings Of...

Lillie Marshall is an English teacher, writer, and artist whose work I've seen on social media for many years. So when she reached out to me last week to tell me about her new project called Drawings Of... I was more than happy to take a look at it.

Drawings Of... is a website full of Lillie Marshall's cartoons that were drawn for the purpose of teaching English lessons. Throughout the site you will find cartoons and written lessons about a variety of topics that are commonly taught in English classes. Take a look at this list of homophone cartoons or this list of figurative language examples to get a better sense of what Drawings Of... is all about. 

Lillie Marshall also has a YouTube channel that includes a playlist of Drawings Of... videos. In those videos you can see how she creates her cartoons. Many of the videos provide helpful English lessons on their own. It was in the Drawings Of... playlist that I found this helpful video about the spelling of "no one."

Applications for Education
Drawings Of... is exactly the kind of site that can help students get a better understanding of some tricky concepts in the English language. There's also a section the site that has a set of drawing and writing prompts that can could be helpful when a student says, "I don't know what to write about."