Shape collages are a wonderful collaging activity for young children. Even though shapes are not only geometric and restricted to the 3 or 4 basic ones, that is how I usually start with shapes, using basic geometric shapes.

If you notice above, there are 3 basic shapes without the common circle, which I normally would add to this collaging activity but I already did  a separate circle shape collage activity so its more of a continuation of shape collaging.

The age of the children is what really determines how much time you can spend on activities like shape collages.

With children that are already 5-6 years old, you can’t do too many shape collages as they may get bored unless you add different flavors to your collage activities as I did in collaging with a twist.

They would then be ready to move on to collages like torn paper collages of all sorts and then onto themed collages.

Really young children like the 2-3 yr olds can paste anything, very often, and are not even usually aware of what they are pasting, so involved in just the activity of pasting itself are they.

So I would say that it’s that in between stage of 3-5, where you can try to expand their shape collages activities by making varieties of background, shapes and in general one can mix ‘n match shapes, background and  types of materials.

In this activity I have 3 empty pieces of tagboard displayed a the top that you can use either at the same time, by offering them a choice of a special shape to paste onto.

Or, you can do the activities individually.

Here are some variations and combinations of how you can present these different shapes and collages.

1- Shape background with same cutout shapes all same sizes as in 2 examples below

2- Then of course you can add many different size of the the same shape

3- To expand further on the same background same shape, you can also add different materials in that same shape.

4- The next set of activities would be with one shape background and either one different shapes or more than one. so that could be

1. squares on rectangles
2. triangles on squares
3. triangles on circles
4. rectangles on circles
5. triangles AND rectangles on squares
6. ALL the shapes on one background

The combination’s you can use are many and as I said before it will depend on how old the children are and how much they like pasting.

You can always make sure to add interesting materials to these collages and even find different background materials like wallpaper pieces to use to collage on.

If you are a teacher or a homeschool mom, you can use these collages to make a book perhaps of all the shapes the children are learning about and there is of course no reason not to add other shapes of your choosing, like octagons and hexagons.

Of course the older the children are, the more their collages will start to take on the representational look as they try to create pictures out of these shapes.

Just be careful that you don’t get too caught up in the representational collages until the children are really ready.

Even if a child is not making a representational collage one can see the thought that goes into a simple shape collage such as the one below

Remember that as they are doing these collages, they are thinking, solving problems, and will create representational collages when they are ready for it.

In the meantime, make yourself a list and a schedule of the collages and the materials you are going to use in combinations with each other.