My art students, age 3-9, worked together on the paper mosaics. They helped tear construction paper scraps, and I brought torn papers from my color-sorted collage materials. The background material is brown butcher paper.
True, there is a large component of teacher artistic control on paper mosaic murals. The instructional goals:
- Introducing the mosaic medium with historic examples
- Considering permanent and short-lived materials
- Experiencing for ourselves that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts
- Observing magical shimmering effects of different papers
- Working together without spilling too much glue on the newly-stripped and polished linoleum
- *Recognizing the right side and wrong side of papers
- **Imagining an edible mosaic
(The installation gets a bit tricky in the neck/wings intersection.)
(Each panel is 2'x3', or 3'x2'.)
*My dad's golfing buddy once told a joke about a boss yelling out the window to his sod-laying blonde employees, "Green side up!" The children have pieces of paper for the mosaic, but they must determine which side is up for their colored section of the picture.
**We considered fruit slices on a layer of cream cheese, and bell pepper squares on peanut butter. I was stunned when a kindergartener made the connection between mosaics and gingerbread houses!
Puff, the magic dragon, lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Honalee.
Little Jackie Paper loved that rascal Puff
And brought him strings and sealing wax and other fancy stuff, oh
© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder
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