Eric Carle Kinder Collages

After looking at Eric Carle's ABC animal book, Kindergartners learned how to make painted textured papers with spots, stripes, and scratches to prepare for an animal collage project. Then we talked about all the different places animals can live. The kids thought about forests, jungles, grasslands, zoos, oceans, ponds, farms, and even in our houses! They drew a background habitat for their animal first. Then we practiced tearing paper and using our imaginations to make animal shapes from torn paper.Finally, we tore our good painted texture paper to create an animal collage a la Eric Carle.

 One boy was very original and did a penguin who lived in the arctic (we hadn't come up with that one as a group!) I'm not sure if that's a person or another penguin sliding down the iceberg in the background. It looks like he drew some wind to show how cold it was, and even a fish for his penguin to eat!

 You may not have heard of green cows before, but that's what this one is. There's also a chick at the bottom and some birds hanging out on the fence in this farm scene. I think this girl also discovered that coloring big areas goes faster if you use the side of a peeled crayon.

This one is a very big tiger hanging out by a stream.
This project had great diversity in the finished pictures. The kids had a lot of choice, and were really able to envision animal shapes from their torn paper. It was remarkable to see how much they already knew about animals and habitat as they did this project. Animal drawings seem more developed at this age than people drawings. I wonder why that is. All four of my Kindergarten classes went at this in different ways. Some felt anxious about trying to tear a specific shape and wasted a lot of time, while another class finished the background and collage zippity-zip in one session. Our next project is going to build off the shapes idea for a quick "still-life" drawing.