Collaging with Kids
I wanted to teach an art class to my preschoolers class this fall and I really wanted to try and introduce them to a medium that perhaps they hadn’t even heard of before. I was at the craft store when my little one started laughing up a storm. She said, “Look how crazy that is!” pointing to a collaged image of a ballerina with a giant pair of lips and two flowers for eyes. Aha! Collage was just the ticket. We created portrait collages. The portraits gave a general structure that the kids could follow and have fun with.
Planning
I wanted to keep it simple as I was teaching a group of 4 and 5 year olds. The truth was I didn’t want to have scissors or glue as both of these things can end up being pretty frustrating for littles that haven’t quite developed there motor skills for such activities. I solved this with STICKERS!! Yes, a bit more expensive, however totally worth it.
STICKERS
PATTERNED PAPER
COLORED STICKER PAPER (I went with adhesive vinyl-wouldn’t recommend, as it takes about two hours to remove the backing paper. )
And that’s it.
Background Selection
I went with a collection called “All Boys” which seems kind of silly to me, but it did have some really awesome choices and help to keep the background interesting and personalized to each kiddo. They had a blast picking their page.
Face shape and placement
Scissors did come into to play at this point, but only for myself. I asked each kiddo which face shape they would like. A good opportunity to practice all of the different shape names and discuss the features of each shape. We then decided where to place on the page. As mentioned before it did end up being quite a pain to remove the backing paper on this particular type of paper.
Decorating with stickers
Then the fun began. We went through each part of the face and selected from the various sticker packs what to use. I was so pleased that there wasn’t too much arguing over who got what sticker, but it is definitely something to keep in mind when selecting sticker packs.
Final Product
This was an absolute hit and I encourage you to give it a try. My four year old and two year old both had me put their portraits up in their room and even I had a lot of fun just demonstrating it to the class. We got out a few rolls of colored tape in the end as some of the girls wanted to add “hair” to their pictures as well.
