Portraits allow students to draw on a topic of direct interest to them while developing their understanding of the human form. Self portraits encourage students to illustrate how they view themselves as individuals and family portraits encourage students to show how they view themselves within their families. Future self portraits let students think about who they want to be in the future. Portraits of other classmates help students examine the differences and similarities among their peers.
Elaborate drawings of numbers and letters help familiarize kindergartners with these basic forms, aiding them in their future writing endeavors. Instruct students to draw outlines of the numbers zero through nine and color them in. Similarly, assign each student a letter and have her draw the outline and color it in. Personalize the letter lesson further by having students draw and color the letters of their first name.
Instructing students to draw a picture based on a story helps develop their future reading comprehension abilities by forcing them to visualize the text. Instruct the kindergartners to choose a fairy tale, nursery rhyme or other favorite story and draw a character or scene from that story. Alternatively, pick a story to read in class and have each student draw a picture that relates to that one story, instead. Compare and contrast the finished drawings and talk about everyone's different perspective on the reading.
Start by passing out an outline of a window or by instructing students to draw their own window on a blank sheet of paper. Inside the window frame, students must draw something they think could be outside. Encourage students to complete the task without looking outside, but if some students struggle to come up with ideas, let them look out the nearest window for a few seconds before completing their drawings. Encourage students to be as realistic or imaginative as they want in order to help expand the limits of their creativity.
Help kindergartners build a thorough understanding of the lines and shapes that make up their world. Encourage them to fill a blank sheet of paper with various lines -- swirled, straight, jagged and so on -- or various shapes -- circles, squares, triangles and more. Students should color each shape or divided section of the page using a different color to further emphasize the different appearances. Alternatively, assign each student a shape and instruct them to draw something that uses that shape.