Personal Collages:  4th and 5th Grade

We read the book Emily’s Blue Period, which is about a girl whose parents are divorcing and now she has two homes.
Emily was learning about Pablo Picasso, his Blue Period and his collages in her art class. She goes through her own “blue period” of sadness.  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 love this book and the illustrations in it.

My students 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 they could choose to use.  The children made personal collages with items that were meaningful to them and told about their lives and interests.

As a launching point for collage techniques I used parts of this Autobiographical Sketchbook Collage powerpoint that I bought from The Interdisciplinary Visual Arts shop at TPT.

It is so important to teach art projects that allow kids to express themselves and to make art that is meaningful to them with their own ideas!

The kids LOVE this project and they love talking about their life with their classmates.  Many of the students brought in lots of personal family photos for this project.  If there are any faces on these collages, they have been covered with a colored shape for privacy.