The Western Wall is one of the holiest places  for Jews and is in Jerusalem, Israel. If you want to see it live you can check out this webcam of it here. Next week is a day called Tisha Be’av that commemorates the destruction of the temple about 2000 years ago, of which the Western Wall is the only part left. Since this comes out in middle of our art camp, we made a Kotel (the Hebrew name for Western wall) collage.

We first showed the children some pictures of what the Kotel looks like. It’s a very large wall with imposing stones of varying sizes. We gave them lots of different squares and rectangles that were in the brown and beige family to choose from to create their walls.

After those were done, we had them all draw their own set of people, cut them out and paste them onto the wall. (people praying)

We also talked about other elements that are there like birds and grass sticking out. Below are some results.

As I was putting together this post I remembered that we had done this another year as well and when I pulled up the images I saw that we had also given them , blue papers to use for skies if they wanted. I think we also used felt materials as well as paper then. Here are some of those results.

This is just another way to show how you can do a full group activity that usually gets done in a copycat manner, in a more creative way.