How to Make Your Own Read and Draw Worksheets

Read and draw activities are great practice for young readers, and it’s easy to make your own read and draw worksheets at home with just some paper and a pen.

My recently released children’s book, The Nighttime Adventures of Calvin and Ollie, is a read and draw story, or an illustrate-it-yourself adventure. Children get to draw out the story on each page and have an entire book they illustrated themselves.

However, you can also make any book into a read and draw activity.

Why Read and Draw?

• Read and draw activities encourage children to visualize what they read, which is good practice for children in today’s digital world who interact more with moving pictures (screen time) than past generations of children.
• By drawing out what they have read, children interact with text on a deeper level. They must be more engaged rather than simply passing over words without understanding the ideas presented.
• When children draw what they read, adults have insight into how well they understand the text.
• Drawing is fun. Drawing can make reading more fun for early readers or struggling readers. It gives them a chance to be creative and express themselves while practicing their reading skills.

How to Make a Read and Draw Worksheet

There are several resources for read and draw activities online. Many teachers offer their own for a small price through Teacher Pay Teacher. I’ve also put together a Back to School Read and Draw activity and a few Halloween Read and Draw worksheets.

However, it is easy to make your own in just a moment or even on the go. Pull out some paper while you’re in the waiting room at the dentist, while you’re on the airplane, or when you’re hearing that all-to-often refrain, “I’m bored,” on a rainy weekend.

One way to make your own read and draw activity is to simply write a sentence or two of your own that fits with your child’s reading level. They can read the sentence and draw a picture of what it says.

Another way that requires zero creativity on your part is to write out a couple sentences from a book on a blank piece of paper. We did this recently with our Dick and Jane anthology as both of my children are beginning readers. Dick and Jane books have easy words and simple sentence structures. What also makes Dick and Jane books lend well to this activity is that the sentences in many stories are fairly generic, leaving a lot of room for the imagination. Without the pictures of Dick and Jane, children can imagine their own story to go with the text.

Our Dick and Jane Read and Draw Activity

I flipped to a random page in our Dick and Jane anthology, and wrote out the text. I substituted my children’s names for the book characters’ names:

 

Oh Alice.
See Calvin.
See Calvin go.
Oh, oh, oh.
Go, Alice, go.

 

Instead of looking at the picture to see help determine what is happening in the story, my kids imagined their own scenario to go with the text.

For my daughter it was about flying on an airplane to Dallas.

For my son, it was about traveling in a steam train.

 

For more ideas to engage your child in reading and practice reading comprehension, follow my blog and connect with me on Pinterest.