I take no credit for this program idea, which was developed by some of my lovely colleagues to coincide with our summer programming theme of “Journey Through Time”, though I did tweak a few things to better fit my group and my space. But this program is so accessible, adaptable and fun, I just had to share it!
The premise to explore some of the different ways that people have decorated their spaces and communities throughout time.
As an ice breaker, I asked participants to describe how they’ve decorated their rooms. Do they have posters on their walls, or a special bedspread? Maybe their walls are a different color or covered with stickers or decals, or perhaps they have their favourite books displayed on a bookshelf. We talked about how people can express themselves, their likes and their interests through the way they decorate their spaces, which lead into our first activity – discovering how people decorated their personal spaces thousands of years ago!
I printed out colour photos of famous cave paintings found across Europe, which date back tends of thousands of years, and talked a bit about the people who made those paintings, and what we think the images might represent. Common motifs are hand prints and local animals. We talked about what animals we might put on our walls, based on the creatures we see around us – dogs, cats, coyotes, squirrels, skunks, raccoons, chipmunks, chickens, ducks, Canada geese, maybe even bears!
To make our “cave” I taped brown paper up on one side of the program room. For the first part of the activity, we picked pieces of colored paper, traced our hands, decorated the handprints, cut them out, and glued them to the wall. I had a pretty young group, so this was all great fine motor skills practice! It’s also great fun to work with different mediums.
After we stuck our hands up on the wall, we added other decorations directly to the wall – kids drew cats and bunnies, abstract squiggles, a lot of happy faces (“to make the cave feel happy!”) and other fun designs. We had some paper on the other side of the room, too, so the kids could spread out and have their own space to create.
Then we moved on to the present day. I read a lovely picture book about how public art helped reshape a community – MAYBE SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL.
We used vibrant chalk pastels to decorate our brick city wall (just printed paper on a roll), just like the characters did in the book! We also made our own stencils – this website has a great tutorial for how to make simple stencils. Other versions of this program run at different branches looked at the history of graffiti, but since we have some beautiful murals on this side of the city (and a bit of a problem with graffiti tagging on people’s garage doors…) I decided to focus more on the transformative power of murals and community art projects.
I had a large group, so I kept the art supplies to a minimum, with chalk pastels, markers and crayons, but depending on your space, your group, and your comfort level when it comes to messes in the library, you could definitely bust out the glitter glue and paint! It would be fun to use sponges to paint in the stencils – this post shares the brilliant idea of using wooden laundry clips to keep mess at a minimum.
You certainly don’t need to have brick-patterned paper to run this activity – you could easily do both activities with plain brown or white paper taped to the wall, or even just put on a table or on the floor, if you don’t have a programming room. As long as you have a space where kids can get creative with art supplies, you can run this fun program.
We didn’t need any other activities to fill up the time, but you could add an activity where kids think about what art might look like in the future, to round out the theme of travelling through time!
What kinds of fun activities have you been doing over the summer?
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