Don't Let the Pigeon...

This is a lesson I put together years ago for my first graders. We drew and painted the pigeon from Mo Willems' book.
(Here is his handout with step-by-step directions. Here is his interactive site with games and more.) Originally I would help my students create these Pigeon inspired book covers from their paintings with a rule from our art room. We used keynote on the desktop. Here is the tutorial for this technique. Today I recorded a tutorial for doing this project on the iPad. This technique would empower young artists to do each step of this project independently starting with THIS TEMPLATE. You might also want to show my animated and narrated version of the book, Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus (also created using Keynote). Oh, and here is a worksheet to print out to help your students plan their design.

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iPad tutorial using Keynote app

Pigeon Spoof Tutorial for the iPad from Tricia Fuglestad on Vimeo.

Desktop tutorial using Keynote

Digital Art Lesson Using Keynote from Tricia Fuglestad on Vimeo.

Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus from Tricia Fuglestad on Vimeo.

EXTEND THE LESSON:
Try animating your pigeon using the DoInk Animation app and Green Screen app.

1. Prepare template in keynote
   
2. Animate in DoInk & save to shared folder
   
3. Import the book cover (w/o pigeon) in DoInk's Green Screen app 
   
4. Import the animation from shared folder over the cover 
   

Keynote, DoInk Green Screen & Animation Apps

Try this musical meme idea with the pigeon:

Related Resource:

Maybe you want to try a mix of drawn images with photos. You can have the pigeon show up in real life as these first graders tried.  View the images here. We were inspired by Knufflebunny, a book by the same author. Watch the video of my reading below.

Knufflebunnybook from Tricia Fuglestad on Vimeo.