Intro to Collage

The goal of this lesson is to give young students the opportunity to develop some fine motor skills in cutting and gluing:

DRAWING CIRCLES
- this is a skill that is surprisingly difficult for a lot of people. Don't expect good circles from your littles. In fact, your child's circles may look like anything but circles. That's ok. Time and repeated practice will help them grow and develop this skill.
CUTTING SHAPES
- using scissors is a practiced skill! Don't take over this part of the project for them. Don't let your desire for a "good" outcome take away the purpose of the activity. Your child's cutting will be all kinds of bad... at first. Give them the opportunity to grow.
USING A GLUE BOTTLE
- A surprisingly difficult skill! Many families have glue sticks rather than glue bottles. If you want to substitute out glue sticks instead, that's fine. I just find that glue sticks don't "stick" as well as traditional glue.
- If using a glue bottle;
  - teach "right-y tight-y, left-y loose-y" to help children know how to open and close a glue bottle (that mnemonic works for tightening and loosening screws, too)
  - teach "dot, dot, not a lot" to help children learn how to control the amount of glue they are putting on the backs of parts.

SUPPLIES

Colorful construction paper
pencil
scissors
glue (stick or bottle)
a black paper to glue the circles onto

Step One

Have your child select four colors of construction paper that they love. You can give your child any size of paper that you wish, but I find that giving them small squares helps limit the size of the project to something more manageable for their little hands and attention spans.

Step Two

Have your child draw circles with a pencil on the papers. Encourage them to draw big, medium, and small circles and to use ALL of the paper up.

Next, hand your child a pair of scissors and have them cut out all of their circles! Remember, your child's skill with drawing and cutting are what we are working on here. Don't take over for them. It is ok if they don't do it perfectly. This is why we're here!

Step Three

"DOT, DOT, NOT A LOT"

Time to glue circles onto a black paper!

This is very difficult for littles to master.

Teach your child to put the glue on the smaller paper, then stick it to the bigger paper. Children have a tendency to pour glue all over the bigger paper... only to find they have used WAY too much glue. Teaching this technique will save a lot of messes down the road as your children learn how to better manage their supplies.

Step Four

Encourage your child to explore how the circles are going to interact with one another on the page. Start with the bigger circles, then move to the medium and small circles. Some of the circles can OVERLAP for interest.

Final Project

As your child starts placing the smallest circles, you can talk about placing them in lines and groupings that look interesting and lead the eye.

\When finished, your child should have a fun abstract art project!

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