Super Simple Collage Making

Making a collage is one of the best free form art techniques for artists of any age - preschoolers love it. The choices of items to collage with are limitless. We've used colorful bits of yarn and ribbon; snips of cloth or colored paper; rice and pasta in different shapes; grasses, leaves and small stones gathered from nature walks. We've torn pictures from magazines and newspapers, cut figures from greeting cards, sprinkled glitter and sequins and colored sand.

The trick is getting it all to stick on the paper and stay stuck!

That's where the secret comes in to play...
We use self-adhesive contac - type paper.
A good size square, taped sticky side up to the table works wonderfully.
(Tape it to keep it from sliding around and also to keep the child from picking the paper up and sticking it to itself - and if it's not taped down, the child surely will...)
The self-adhesive paper needs no drying time and will hold material that is heavier (like pasta) without a problem.

This is our collage of yesterday - using snips of foil ribbon, sequins and beads.
Lovely!

Father's Day

Tomorrow Maya's daddy is coming to celebrate an early Father's Day with Maya.
Today we made a picture of "Maya's Garden" as a gift for him.
We used:
*construction paper - blue, green and white
*foam flower stickers (we happened to have some, we could have just as easily cut flowers from more construction paper)
*glue
*scissors

First we made the butterfly by tracing around each of Maya's feet on the white paper. We made the leaves by tracing around her hands on the green paper. I got busy cutting out the hand/leaves while Maya began to color her butterfly. (We left the footprints uncut on the white paper for easier coloring) When she was done, we cut out each of the footprint/butterfly wings. We drew a caterpillar with back marker on the blue paper and glued the footprint/wings on either side. Then we glued the handprint/leaves onto the paper too. Maya peeled the paper from the foam flower shapes with tremendous determination (and if I was still teaching I would say she was honing her fine motor skills - blah,blah...blah,blah) She showed the same meticulous concern in placing each flower and each circle on the butterfly "just so".

We had fun doing this project. Maya is proud of her work and eager to show Daddy when he comes in the morning. I think her Daddy will treasure the garden of hands, heart and soles of his little girl.