Old magazines
Glue stick
Scissors
Give your child a pair of scissors and a few magazines suitable for cutting up. Before he begins snipping out small pictures, he should look for one large picture that would make a good background for his collage. Help him carefully cut this picture out and set it aside. He can then flip through other pages, clipping out images to glue onto the background. If he remembers a dream he has had recently, he may want to look for photos that tell the story. Alternatively, he can select random images that catch his eye. (The surrealists often juxtaposed images that had little or nothing to do with one another.) This higgledy-piggledy placement of unrelated pictures will give a dreamlike feeling to his collage.
Spread out the clipped pictures and separate them by size into three groups: small, medium and large. Help the artist center the background picture onto a piece of construction paper and glue it in place. He can experiment with arranging the clippings without using glue. At first, he probably will place the pictures all in a straight line, but you may want to suggest that he try layering some pictures on top of others. Combining parts of different pictures can produce unusual and comical effects. How about a cat's head on a person's body? A car driving on top of a carrot? The key to this lesson is to create a space that is unreal and unusual, so anything goes. When he has settled on an arrangement he likes, he can glue the images in place.
(Ages seven and up)
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