Eric Karle Inspired Collages

For our Eric Karle Inspired Collages, we had to create a layout for a storybook that was based on the artwork by Eric Karle. We first had to choose a certain character and decide on the scene of a story. Then, we sketched the scene and character on a piece of 12x18 scratch paper.  

We created paste paper by taking a piece of white construction paper and mixing different colors and designs/textures on the piece of paper until the whole thing was covered. We let those colored paste papers dry. We used different colored paste papers to cut out the shapes of the character/scene from our scratch paper.

When all the shapes were cut out, we then laid them all down on a piece of construction paper and assembled our collage. After that, we had to glue all the pieces down. Finally, along with the character and scene on the piece of construction paper, we had to write a caption that would be on that page of the storybook!

I think a good extension activity for this would be to do something similar with the character and the scene. You could have your students choose any scene and character just like we did with this project. I do like the idea of doing a layout based on an artist but something different could be that the students could use pieces or strips from a magazine to put over the shapes of the character and scene. That would be really different and cool to see all of the colors and designs that you could come up with!