Character and Setting Collages for End-of-Year and Summer School!!

A fun end-of-year activity or summer school activity is making a Character or Setting Collage! You can use old magazines to cut out “Characters.” They may be pictures of celebrities, political figures, community leaders, animals, cartoons or advertisements with people who remind you of characters from children’s literature. Collages can be done individually by using Maps from the Story Grammar Marker^® Manual or Braidy the StoryBraid^® manual (below) and pasting the magazine clippings right on to the Map.

Another idea is to do this as a group activity like the one pictured here which has the “Character” magnet from MindWing’s Universal Magnet set at the top.

Another variation on this activity is to use the popular App “PicCollage” (on smartphone or tablet/iPad) to make a collage. The one below is a collage of Settings with the theme “Summer Vacation Setting Wishlist. ” This would be a wish list of places that kids and teachers would like to visit this summer (or a bucketlist of places to visit in general). To do this, use a Setting Map from the Braidy the StoryBraid^® Manual or Story Grammar Marker^® manual to brainstorm places that would be fun to visit over the summer. Then, google Images of those places and save in device storage. Next, go to the Pic Collage App and import the “Summer Vacation Setting” images along with the “Star” icon of the Story Grammar Marker^®. Pic Collage is very easy to use and as you can see, you can even add text to label the different Summer Vacation Settings. It is easy to send the saved image to print, email or put on social media.

The next step might be to brainstorm possible “kick-offs” that could happen to a Character or within any of these Settings (ex., a shark at the beach, meeting a celebrity in NYC, encountering a bear at Yellowstone, meeting Mickey Mouse, etc). Whether you make a collage using magazine clippings and paste or with the App version, this is an engaging, fun activity and a great way to teach the concepts of Character and Setting! Enjoy!