Children will benefit from practising skills learned in the workshop.

Shading: children can work on creating a range of tones from black to almost white using various media - pencil, charcoal, and charcoal pencils.

Shading Objects: Children can practise drawing and shading round and cylindrical objects as they did in the workshop, carefully observing the areas of light and dark, and the mid-tones. Shadows under the objects are very important; children should observe the darkest part of the shadow, usually directly underneath the object. They should also look for lighter areas within shadows - where reflections occur from lighter areas such as the table. It might be worth pointing out all these tones on a photograph and in artwork.

Erasing and Chalk: practise using an eraser (you can get putty erasers but they are expensive) to remove charcoal (or pencil). Chalk can also be used to create lighter areas. Fingers are also very useful for removing excess charcoal, but children must learn not to smudge what they have already done. They should practise charcoal drawing and erasing while keeping hands etc. off the rest of the drawing.

Blending: is a very useful skill. Children can use fingers or erasers (or bread rolled into dense chunks) to blend areas of charcoal together to get a smoother look, and to smooth changes between tone areas.

2. Other Pencils

There are a range of pencils available in terms of hardness or blackness. For shading blacker pencils are very useful, such as 6B or even 8B. Children can practise using these, shading with the side of the pencil for a smoother look.

3. Upside Down Drawing

Give children a black and white photograph which they must look at upside down. This is to see it as an abstract image, so they can try to accurately reproduce the pattern of light and shade without being distracted by what the objects in the picture are. The next step is to copy a photo the right way round, but still seeing it as an abstract pattern of light and shade. Finally children should be able to do this with a real object. With both photos and real objects, it helps to squint to see the areas of tone. Squinting cuts out the distracting details, leaving only tone.

4. Avoiding Colour Distraction

It is hard to see coloured objects as pure tones - for example to see whether a green hue is darker than a red hue. You can take digital photos of an object and show them in black and white to teach the children how colours have a tone separate from their hue. This may help them to draw coloured objects with correct tone. You could show coloured photographs on an interactive whiteboard, then convert them to black and white (there are various ways to do this; on Word, click on the picture, go to Format Picture, then Picture, then on Image Control change to Grayscale).

Children could also copy a well-known painting in pencil and charcoal to practise seeing colour tones.

5. Quick Charcoal Sketches

A common art class exercise is to get students to make 2 or 3 minute sketches with charcoal. The point is to teach them to focus on getting the overall form and shading, rather than details. People are often distracted by details from seeing the whole - and the whole is more important (think of woods and trees). You could do this four or five times in 15 minutes.

6. Lineless Drawings

Another art class exercise is to get students to draw an object (person, etc.) by only shading - not by doing lines first. The form will end up not being very accurate, but this is only an exercise. The point is to train children to focus on seeing tone and reproducing it, without the distraction of line or shape. After all, in real life there are few lines, only boundaries between areas of different colour and tone. You could make this into a Pictionary-type game - children draw from photos for a partner who has to guess what the object is. (you could make many other art activities into a Pictionary game as well, such as the 3 minute charcoal sketch).