Emily’s Blue Period – Personal Collages for 3rd Graders

Our school librarian introduced this book to me and I think it is such a sweet story.  This book is called Emily’s Blue Period by Cathleen Daly.  The illustrations are lovely. This is a story about Emily, whose parents are divorcing and now she has two homes.  She goes through her own “blue period” of sadness.

Emily was learning about Pablo Picasso, his Blue Period and his collages in her art class.   Her art teacher asks the class to make personal collages about their homes.  She doesn’t know what to do because she has two homes now.

She ends up making a beautiful meaningful collage about all the parts of her life that are dear to her heart.

I read this book to my third graders and they brought in items from home such as photographs, ticket stubs, photocopies of ribbons, candy or food wrappers and pictures of old artwork.  I also had some scrapbooking paper, magazines, stickers and embellishments from my stash at home.  The children created personal collages with all of the items that were meaningful to them.  At the end, they wrote a paragraph or two artist statement explaining all of the items they’ve included.  Many of the students said this was their favorite project they made all year.  They were all very excited because they had many stories to share about all of their items.  I wanted to take pictures of all of them to share, but I only took photos of portions of the collages.  The students had included many personal photos of themselves and their families and I did not want to post those online.  The portions you see in these photos are all of the other ephemera they included, so you could get the idea.  Just imagine personal photos on the collages also.