collage Archives - Let their light shine!

Black paper collage

Black paper collage to make those colours pop! There is nothing wrong with using pastel coloured sugar paper or the off white recycled sugar paper but black paper makes a great alternative. You can really enjoy the colours of the collage. They stand out and the collage looks vibrant.

All you need to make a black paper collage

Good quality black paper that can take plenty of glue. If you want to you can use card.
PVA glue and glue speaders (Glue sticks are an option but PVA works better in this activity as it will stick all the collage materials so that’s what we used for this make)
Collage materials – card shapes (ours were from a charity shop and I’m pretty sure were once part of a make your own greetings card kit), feathers, stickers, tissue paper, pictures from magazines, ribbon, fabric pieces, yarn
Light coloured crayons – white, yellow

To make – This is a great craft for letting children choose what to use. I like to lay out all the collage materials in a way that makes it easy for young children to see what there is. A couple of ideas are to sort the collage materials by colour or type. Before the children begin decant some PVA glue in to shallow containers that won’t spill easily. Then let the children create. Some children will want to pack their paper with loads of materials and others may be happy with one or two things on the paper. Let them choose what they want to do.

Take a look at this helpful article about collage and young children.

The article mentions collecting recycled items for a collage ‘busy box’ which is a great idea. Ask your friends and family for donations of yarn and fabric offcuts, paper and greetings card pictures, ribbon – all sorts of things we can use for collage.

Here’s a blog post about craft supplies – some bought and some collected!

Group craft to make!

Group craft to make! offers an alternative to having everyone make something to take home. Some things really lend themselves to a big group make. For example you can draw a large Goliath to decorate with collage material, make the Tower of Babel either build the tower with cardboard boxes or create a 2D version by sticking ‘bricks’ onto a roll of paper. Noah’s Ark makes a great large group craft too. We have enjoyed creating Noah’s Ark together in our toddler group.

All you need

Floor space or tables put together lengthways
Roll of wall paper/lining paper spread out
An outline of Noah’s Ark and the water
Glue sticks
Blue tissue paper shapes
Blue crepe paper shapes
Animal stickers (or animal pictures cut from magazines) or a mixture!

We just let children join in as they wished as the craft activity was set up during our free play time. We weren’t pernickety about the animals being in pairs!

The beauty of a group craft like this is that everyone owns it and you can display it afterwards and use it during the story time. If your group meets in a church building see if you can display what you’ve made for a few weeks for your church to see something that happens in the Toddler Group.

Give the children freedom to create!

If you would rather have an open ended large group craft then just provide the paper roll (either on tables or on the floor) and wax crayons and collage materials. Challenge the group to cover the paper! Adults can find it quite difficult to just go ahead and create but it’s a good thing to do! Encourage adults and toddlers to chat about the colours, shapes and textures that they are using.

You can do a cover the paper challenge on a small scale too. Just have a selection of collage materials, glue and paper on the craft table. For the collage materials here’s a list of ideas. It’s worthwhile asking for donations of yarn, fabric and greetings cards and magazines. Free stuff is great!

Tissue paper
Feathers
Yarn
Fabric
Sequins
Paper shapes
Crepe paper
Pictures from magazines – people, places, food, nature
Pictures from greetings cards
Wrapping paper scraps

Picture using a variety of collage materials

Bible alphabet – E is for Eve

E is for Eve. Although the bible doesn’t say that Eve ate an apple we used an apple to tell the story from Genesis 3 as it’s a familiar fruit for the children. It worked well having two real apples to choose from held by a person pretending to be a tree. Then an adult playing the part of Eve chose the apples that they had been told they couldn’t eat and gave it to an adult pretending to be Adam.

With older children you could include the role of the serpent.

The craft is very simple.

Paper Plate Apple

You need

paper plate

red and green tissue paper squares – or crepe paper

sugar/construction paper stalk and leaf (you could stick these on for the children if they are very young – under threes may not place them at the edge of the plate – but that may not matter. It is the process of making that matters rather than an end product that an adult has altered!)

Glue sticks

The Lost Sheep

http://www.activityvillage.co.uk/pdfs/sheep_colouring_page_1.pdf

Over the next three weeks our Bible stories at Toddler group will be about ‘Lost Things’. we start with the story Jesus told about the Lost Sheep from Luke 15:1-7.

We will be referring to ‘lots of sheep’ rather than using large numbers – 99 and 100, which don’t mean much if you are under 3 years old.

There is a simple craft. The sheep worksheet is from Activityvillage (link above). The children can add cotton wool and colour with wax crayons. I sometimes limit the choice of colours, but on other occasions I may be quite happy with multi-coloured sheep!