I just finished my 6th year as a TAB teacher. This is my first post in quite a few years and I am in the midst of adding updates to what I have done the last number of years.

My first post about TAB collage was here about the Collage center in the TAB classroom. You can read all about that over there at that link.

I teach TAB grades 1-6 and every year I do something different to start off my center.

I evaluate what I did the year before and change things up a bit. I use what worked and discard what didn't'.

There is an amazing Facebook group called Teaching for Artistic Behavior for anyone doing TAB that has not heard about it.

All the teachers there are so giving and sharing of their materials that they create and I learned most of what I know about TAB from that group.

Below is a set of task cards that a teacher prepared (I wish I remembered who so I could give her credit).

For a year or so I used some task cards but, didn't end up using a lot of the ideas on these task cards. I just didn't find that there would be much interest in some of them so I didn't use them.

I always give the children certain collages they have to create in order to use the collage center.

I don't remember exactly which collages I offered each year so I will just tell you all the ones I've been using all together.

Below was one particular year where I think they had 4 kinds of collages they had to create.

One was to use geometric shapes, another to cut out organic shapes, a third was to take a photo or an image and recreate it through collage and a fourth was to use tissue paper to make a collage.

From each of the children I chose their best one and used it to display in the halls of our school. Take a look at these gorgeous collages.

These 3 pictures were examples of how the children used patterned, scrapbook paper they had to use.

What I have also started doing lately is to introduce certain tools that they can use in the collage center as well.

I had been finding that if I just made everything available at once then some of these tools got lost and they didn't even get to use them, or even know they were there.

One of those what I call fancy scissors but I see Amazon calls decorative edge scissors and below are some of the ways they've used them.

I also bought craft punchers last year and this is the set I have.

I don't like to get the ones that are too small as the pieces cut out are a bit small to handle. For the most part I also try to get them ones like shapes and not too many that are images. I find they are more creative that way.

I also teach them negative and positive shapes through the pieces they punch out and I encourage the use of the negative space pieces in their collages.