Tell your second graders that artistic realism means capturing an image exactly as it appears in reality. Assign them to create self-portraits that are realistic to their actual appearances. Encourage children to pay attention to detail, such as the colors of their eyes, hair and skin, the style of their hair and what kind of clothes they are wearing. Tell them to pay attention to the proportions of the features in comparison with the rest of the face. Provide children with small mirrors so that they can look at themselves while drawing.
Help second graders create imaginative and creative self-portraits. Allow them to draw themselves realistically, but explain that they can also be more creative and depict themselves as an alien, a unicorn or a superhero, for example. Allow students to represent themselves in nontraditional ways. For example, if a student chooses to create her self portrait in the form solid blocks of color, encourage this experimentation.
Ask students to draw not what they look like but what they feel. Give them creative control of how they depict their feelings in this emotional self-portrait. For example, if one student is feeling especially joyful, she may draw herself jumping through a field of flowers. If another student is feeling upset, he might portray this by filling in his entire paper with a solid color that to him represents this emotion. Ask each student to write several sentences explaining their feelings self-portrait.
Regardless of the style of self-portrait you encourage your students to create, offer them a variety of tools. Give them the option of using watercolors, markers, colored pencils, ink pens and crayons. Encourage them to mix and match various art tools. Explain that they can draw half of their face with colored pencils and the other half with markers, or they can choose specific features to draw with crayon while using watercolors for the rest.