There is such a proliferation of preprinted and cut out materials for children to use all over the place.

There are coloring books and workbooks galore all over the internet and in thousands of early childhood classrooms all over the world.

I however, if you know my work, know that I do not prescribe to all this preprinted stuff but I saw this idea somewhere that struck my fancy and I decided Hey! this may be a great way to marry tow ideas. Use some preprinted stuff and add some creativity.

I collected some images that had flowers on them from old calendars that I had and told the children that they could make a flower garden or anything having to do with flowers. I gave them these images plus some yarn and craftsticks and told them they can cut out the flowers and use the yarn and crafts sticks to add to the pictures

I was disappointed with this activity.

What happened was the kids got so involved with just cutting out the flowers that creativity didn’t come much into play here.

One child actually just cut out a whole piece from a calendar(notice the bear below) and pasted the whole piece of paper onto her paper.

When I mentioned to some of the other children that the assignment did have them also using the crafts sticks and yarn they kind of just pasted some down as in the 2 examples below.

My assessment was that seeing the preprinted pictures and allowing them to use them kind of froze the children s creativity.

I decided to give them another flower creating activity without prepared shapes.

This time I showed them many of the pictures just to use for inspiration and told them that their collage needed to have a flowers or many flowers in it.

I told them they could take ideas from the pictures or they could use their own ideas.

I did throw out a umber of ideas which they could use. I always say if you want to give children any ideas that’s fine as long as you give them at least 5 so they are not locked in.

I also presented them with alot more materials that they could choose from.

I’m also just noting an interesting technique that someone came up with that some of the kids used with their collages. We saw that if they took large pieces of colored tissue paper and put them down and brushed water on top of them, then they could get that color onto their paper.

This children who did a girl watering flowers made a blue sky out of tissue paper.

The collage below has a background that was also created from tissue paper dyeing.

This one (I don’t know if you can see)has the flowers folded over so that they are 3d.

The 2 pictures below were from children younger than the ones above. the child who created the one with all the sequins got very carried away by making small tiny flowers without looking at the big picture and the other one was satisfied by what she did as well.

The trick is to realize that different children will create according to their age level and patience level as well.

So as you can see, using pre printed pictures for the kids stifles their creativity alot more than giving them many more materials does.