Colourful Collage!

Making a collage is easy, fun and a great way for little ones to practice their fine motor skills. Once assembled, they can see their work and touch it too experiencing all the different textures and materials. Collage is actually one of the areas of artistic experience that children should be exposed to within the EYFS, along with painting, drawing, printing, textiles and 3D.

So, how to go about having some collage fun:

1. Find your materials: go out into the park for leaves, to the shop for paper, look in the recycle bins for other materials. You could make the looking an activity in itself by talking about how each item feels, how heavy it is, whether it will stick onto paper and what colour it is.
2. Then you can start sticking and gluing!

Tips:

• Make sure the paper you use is heavy enough to hold the collage. You don't want it ripping.
• Make sure you have plenty of strong but non toxic glue so bits don't fall off!
• Make sure you have plenty of space to really get stuck in!
• Make sure everything is covered i.e. clothing and table tops to ensure no gluey accidents.
• Don't tell the children what to do necessarily; let them experiment!

Collage materials:

• Cotton wool, wool, string.
• Leaves, grasses, flowers.
• Tissue paper, wrapping paper, newspaper and magazine pictures.
• Glitter, sequins, beads.

Other associated activities:

• Foraging for the materials can be fun. Talk about looking high and low, up and down, round the corner etc. Use lots of different words to describe where you are looking and what you are looking for.
• Close work: look at the materials you find closely. Are they rough or smooth, are they prickly or bumpy? Again, describe the items and talk about them.
• Sorting: sort them into little piles and then put them in pots.  Label them for next time. All the buttons together, all the cotton wool together etc.
• Look at the letters that each material begins with: p for paper, and g for glue etc.