Eric Carle Collage

Eric Carle Collage is a lesson many art teachers and Kinder-1st grade teachers love.  The students enjoy it because it involves a book and many visuals for them to work off of.  It also involves a fun way of creating a collage that involves the students getting messy, cutting, using glue, and above all else requires no specific art skills (they can't mess up!).
We started this lesson by reading the Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle.  We then created either caterpillars or butterflies (the students could choose) by painting paper, letting it dry, then cutting out shapes to create the artwork.  This is a project that any younger student would love and it is very simple.
It is definitely a two day project. One day to paint the paper, then next day to glue down the shapes.  Depending on your students you can cut shapes out for them, or they can cut shapes out on their own, either pre-drawn or using a tracing stencil.  I normally like to give my children as much artistic freedom as possible and would usually let them draw their own shapes and cut them up but if you have a large class size you may want to think about pre-cutting the shapes for the students.  You can also talk about the shapes that are in the butterfly and caterpillar, this is a good lead up for a drawing lesson. (I like to teach students to draw by breaking their subjects into shapes.) This lesson is just great overall and is a wonderful lesson for differentiated instruction. Here are some examples.