Ccollage with kids is one of the best art activities  you can do with children.

It has all of the elements of an educational art activity.

It allows children freedom to make choices, take initiative, be different, think and solve problems and be oh! so creative.

Of course this is all according to their developmental levels.

Give a 2 , 3. 4. 5. 6  yr old children (even adults) all of these circles  and just watch at the different types of collages they can make.

In this collage series I will be taking you on a journey through collaging with children.

Collage can be done step by step leading the children to eventually be able to make their own collages on their own.  (tapping into their own discovered creativity)

Collage is alot more than left over scraps of paper from teachers projects and we hope to share wit you all the different types and ideas that you can do with kids.

Make sure you save these collages in a folder so you can see progress.

When I was a preschool director many years ago, I would walk the halls and look at the children’s artwork hung outside the classrooms. I would always be able to tell certain levels of maturity from the collages  the children had done.

Sometimes I could even pick up problems. If a 5 yr old child was collaging like a 3 yr old, we would know to keep an eye out on that child.

Imagine if children only did copycat arts and crafts,  we would never get to see what they were capable of.

For your first circle collages you can do two activities.

We started by giving the children rectangular tagboard and a few different sizes of paper, colorful circles.

The span of the children in this group is around 3 years but I have put in some of the results of this first activity to show you how differently children make even a simple circle collage.

[nggallery id=1]

After having the children finish this first circle collage, we gave them something more to think about

We gave the children large circles cut  out of tagboard as a background and added small children’ s scissors to the equation.

Then we gave them from the same batch of  circles that they were pasting with beforehand. Below are some of the results of that activity

[nggallery id=2]

As you add new variations to simple and old themes children need to think of what they will do next.

• How will they deal with the new shape of this background
• Will they use the scissors and how
• Will they make abstract designs or try  to create something representational

These and more are just some of the questions that children do have to grapple with even when creating a simple collage.

And then of course their creativity is expanded and they feel great about being allowed to create on their own.