Colored sticks on Cardboard

Young children love to do collage and a great medium is just a bunch of colored sticks and colorful cardboard. 
As a provocation you can leave colored paper, colored sticks, and glue on a table, as an invitation for them to explore the materials and create artwork.
This is a good provocation for units related to art appreciation / role of art in our lives / how we can express ourselves.


Questions:

• Can you create artwork with sticks and paper?
• How do sticks feel in your hands?
• What do you want people to feel when they see your artwork?

After the children explore these materials you can add others suggested by the kids. Children should have the freedom to choose what they want to use to create art. 
I might also ask the group to decide on the materials and the children should come to an agreement about what materials would be available to promote negotiation, collaboration and group decision making.

This is an easy project to do at home. You can use any type of sticks, from toothpicks to small twigs collected in your garden or nearby park. 

We explored different gluing techniques. The technique they all chose was to dip the tip of a stick in the glue and place it on the paper. This was the best way to avoid sticky fingers. The students could concentrate on their creation and not in trying to get sticks stuck on their fingers. 

Below are samples of artworks created by some of my 3 and 4 year old students. They were free to do this project as many times they wanted and to return to the same project until they were happy with the results.

I was happy to see that the students created such different pieces even though they were using the same materials.

I have used these same materials to create collaborative work in large poster paper. The process and products were equally fun and beautiful.

Below are sample works from children with ages 3 to 5 years old.