Geometric shape collages are just one of many types of collages you can do with children.

I don’t think that one needs to do a unit of specific shapes with children. If you discuss the different shapes there are around us in life and do some geometric shapes collages this will help do all the  shape teaching you need to do.

Shape collages are a wonderful collaging activity for young children. Even though shapes are not only geometric and restricted to the 3 or 4 basic ones I usually start with the circle shape and then move on to the square, triangle and rectangle shapes. Organic shapes is for older children butt I just saw this wonderful organic shape activity that you may want to try if your children are 5 or 6 already.

The age of the children is what really determines how much time you can spend on activities like shape collages. With children that are already 5-6 years old, you can’t do too many shape collages as they may get bored unless you add different flavors to your collage activities.

You can even add different geometric shapes like hexagons and octagons. Older kids get a kick out of learning those fancy new geometric shapes.

Really young children like the 2-3 yr olds can paste anything, very often, and are not even usually aware of what they are pasting, so involved in just the activity of pasting itself.

It’s the in between stage of 3-5, where you can try to expand their shape collages activities by making varieties of background, shapes and in general one can mix ‘n match shapes, background and  types of materials.

In this activity I have 3 empty pieces of tagboard displayed a the top that you can use either at the same time, by offering them a choice of a special shape to paste onto.

Here are some variations and combinations of how you can present these different shapes and collages.

1- Shape background with same cutout shapes all same sizes as in 2 examples below

2- Then of course you can add many different size of the the same shape

3- To expand further on the same background same shape, you can also add different materials in that same shape.

4- The next set of activities would be with one shape background and either one different shapes or more than one. so that could be

1. Squares on rectangles
2. Triangles on squares
3. Triangles on circles
4. Rectangles on circles
5. Triangles AND rectangles on squares
6. ALL the shapes on one background

The combination’s you can use are many, and as I said before it will depend on how old the children are and how much they like pasting.

You can always make sure to add interesting materials to these collages and even find different background materials like wallpaper pieces to use to collage on. Like these 12″ Rawhide Drum Circles.If you want to buy shapes to add to your collection then Foam Shapes W/ Adhesive are one option as well.

If you are a teacher or a home school mom, you can use these collages to make a book of perhaps  all the shapes the children are learning about and there is of course, no reason not to add other shapes of your choosing like I said before of octagons and hexagons.

Of course the older the children are, the more their collages will start to take on the representational look as they try to create pictures out of these shapes.

Just be careful that you don’t get too caught up in the representational collages until the children are really ready.

Even if a child is not making a representational collage one can see the thought that goes into a simple shape collage such as the one below.

Remember that as they are doing these collages, they are thinking, solving problems, and will create representational collages when they are ready for it.

In the meantime, make yourself a list and a schedule of the collages and the materials you are going to use in combinations with each other.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that there were so many options for the simple shape collage huh?