Animal Collages

This is the first example my two-year-olds created.

  

I don't think I know a single preschool teacher who doesn't adore Eric Carle.  His wonderful stories and colorful illustrations are a staple of my classroom and my lesson planning.  This past week, I decided to try out some animal collage ideas based (loosely) on Eric Carle's fabulous illustrations.  Some of my kids worked with a couple of layers, creating a backgrounds with paint, and then coloring their animal shape with craypas...

My one-year-olds worked with a pre-traced animal shape and collage paper.  Once they were finished decorating the paper, I cut the animal shapes out to create a clean edge...

...Preschool traced their own animal shapes and used a combination of collage elements and craypas.  They were encouraged to work on their cutting skills with teacher supervision...

And my class created their background with crayons, then designed their animals...

Pre-K had a more open-ended project.  They created their own animal shapes, and worked with decorated paper to develop a background.

Here's the whole thing on the ol' art wall.  I love how all of the different styles of work compliment each other, and I'm excited for more collage-based projects in the future!

My First Visual Journal

This is actually the first page; some kids couldn't wait...

 I have kept a journal for as long as I have been able to write, and within the past ten years I have started to keep visual journals as well.  It's incredibly satisfying to have an ongoing personal record, and visual journals are a fantastic creative outlet/brainstorming vehicle.  Recently, I decided to start a visual journal project with my Pre-School and Pre-K classes, and here's a look at our first session.  We started by taking ownership of our journals and customizing the front (and in some cases, back) cover.  I provided students with a variety of materials, such as colored pencils, markers, paint stampers, collage materials and stickers.  The project was completely open-ended:  these are their journals after all.  My kids were extremely focused, and their work turned out beautifully.  I'm thrilled they have taken such a liking to this project, and I'm looking forward to continuing to work on the journals until they are complete. 

I love this student's process; first, she used markers and paint stampers, then she collaged with tissue paper.  Beautiful transparencies.

This students sought out as many pieces of embossed foil paper as she could find in the bag-o-scraps.  She also did some very nice layering with the metallic paint stampers.

This one is very Lisa Frank..

This student thought outside the box and collaged off of the border of the page...

An awesome metallic mosaic!

This one is magical...

This was the first page of my journal.  The kids asked me to draw a monster, but they said this looked too much like an alligator.  Tough crowd!