Pizza is so much fun to explore in preschool. Exploring pizza can lead to conversations about likes, dislikes, shapes, color, vegetables and other food, and of course many different kinds of art, music, math, science, and reading activities. One of our many ways of exploring pizzas included this simple DIY pizza toss game…
The pizza toss drawing game is simple to prepare even if you are like me and have very limited drawing skills. Â First you will need a set of square blocks or a blank dice you can draw on. Â I am always collecting square wooden blocks of different sizes to make my own games with. Â The nice thing about the wooden blocks is that I can reuse them by painting over the drawings and then turning them into a new game…
To create our pizza toss game, I drew different pizza toppings on each side of the small wooden block. Some of my drawings were more recognizable than others but I tried to draw a mushroom, pepperoni, sausage, green pepper, shredded cheese, and a question mark on each side of our blocks. Â I set my DIY pizza toss dice out with round pieces of drawing paper and crayons for the children to draw up their own pizzas…
I demonstrated how to play the game so the children would see that they could make lots of choices in the process. I would say, “Oh look, I got some cheese” and draw some squiggly lines with a yellow crayon on my pizza. Â Then I rolled the dice again and would say, “Oh no, I got more cheese!!” and the children all laughed while I drew more squiggly lines. Â With everything we do, there is always the reminder that my pizza looks the way I want it to look and their pizza can look the way they want it to look…
As the children played our pizza toss game, I observed some very interesting results. Some children were very into drawing lots of different pizza toppings based on which topping rolled up on top of the pizza dice…
Many of my younger students focused on color more than on drawing specific shapes. With each roll of the dice, I would watch them as they reached over to grab the color that landed on top of the pizza dice. Â It was easy to observe how far the children were coming along with their ability to recognize, differentiate, and select the different colors…
And some of my students added elements of a pizza that wasn’t on the dice like pizza sauce!…
Although the children used a drawing prompt to inspire their drawings, every single pizza drawing was unique in design and decision-making and the children all took their time to enjoy the drawing game process…
And a couple of our little guys invented a new way to explore our DIY pizza toss game…
I love using drawing prompts but if you haven’t used a drawing prompt before, keep in mind that the goal isn’t to get kids to draw like you do but rather to inspire them to move beyond the “scribble” type drawings and story telling (although all drawing and mark making is meaningful to the child) and to try new drawing techniques or approaches. In other words, to build on  a child’s drawing skills by inviting the child to add different color, shapes, lines, and his or her own ideas. Don’t make the drawing prompt a right or wrong proposition in the drawing process…
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