I have been participating in a lot of groups at my church lately and we have been making collages as a way to let our hands lead when exploring topics within ourselves. It’s like journaling with your hands! For someone who looooves crafty stuff, like me, it’s perfect and very simple. There are many ways to do this, but the easiest way is to get a stack of magazines and cut or tear out things that jump out at you. Sometimes as you go along a pattern will start to show itself. If not, that’s fine too, you just end up with a pretty picture full of things that you like. Either way it keeps your hands busy while you think!
Today in my one of my classes I began to wonder if I should try this with Noah? His knew favorite thing to do is glue things and we just received these new early learning glue sticks from Elmers (stay tuned for a FUN! spring inspired craft coming up).
I grabbed a stack of old Parents magazines and we sat at the kitchen table and flipped through them together. He was able to pick out things that he liked and then tear out the pages.
The look on his face when he realized that he was allowed to tear apart the magazine was priceless!
He would rip out the pages and then we would cut out the pictures together. This also gave him a chance to practice using safety scissors. This took quite a bit of patience on my part and made me VERY thankful that they work on this in preschool with him, because by the end of it I would just cut it out for him.
Then I gave him the glue stick and a piece of bright yellow paper and let him have fun!
The end result is a piece of paper that contains things that he liked! He is so proud of it and he can’t wait to show his Daddy when he gets home. This is the first piece of “artwork” that he has show this level of excitement over so I consider that to be the best gauge for this activity. We will definitely be doing this again. I am also going to make sure to start saving all the toy catalogs we get in the mail. Those will be perfect for this activity!
I can’t wait to see how his collages evolve. The amount of development processes that this simple activity exercises is pretty amazing!