Group Craft Time
Although people often get together to craft – it all started when we were kids crafting in school – most crafts are individual projects. Sometimes though, it is nice to work together as a team, to learn and to have a creation at the end that was a group effort.
Although this craft is better suited to keeping a group of country kids busy on summer holidays, it works equally well for a group of talented adults. We’re going to make a mural. This craft, a group mural, can be put on display at the school, in a home, shared between the participants or framed as a commemorative work.
Change the materials and instruction to suit your group. I’ve seen this done on large canvas sheets as part of a corporate team-building exercise, but for the purpose of this article, I’ll discuss the child’s version of the craft.
We begin with brown butcher or freezer paper. Most often found at the grocery store, it is about 18 inches wide and very strong enough to stand up to many hands at work. One side of the butcher paper is plastic coated, the side designed to be placed against the food. The non-shiny side takes markers, crayons and glues better.
You’ll need to gather all materials together – once kids get going they don’t want to stop, slow down, or wait for you to get “one more color”. Finger paint and water colors are great and inexpensive for hand prints, swirls of color and names. Spent magazines for cutting out pictures, words and pages make great collages.
It helps to keep everyone focused if you first collaborate on, and choose a group theme. Select a topic that makes sense to the group in some fashion – as a group. Kids just back from a trip to the zoo, or camping, or a day at the White House will supply the theme to aim for.
If the children have nothing in common as a group, choose a holiday or season. A fun mural for October, for instance, is to mix up finger paint in fall colors. Everyone gets to make a tree by first laying their forearm in brown paint, and laying their arm on the paper to make the trunk. If they spread out their fingers from this position, they will have five short branches at the top of their ‘tree’. Leaves are fingerprints all around the top of the tree using paints in other fall colors. Before painting your pre-schoolers for this craft however, add a few drops of dishwashing detergent to the finger paint when mixing it up to make washing up easier on everyone. Another idea for smaller children is to make a mural with an animal theme. Start by finding and cutting out animal pictures to begin with, and let them choose the ones they like the most to glue down.
As for corporate teams, consider your theme and set everyone off to work on their own. Each makes a square of ‘art’ to represent some aspect of the company or the group stands for. The squares are then pasted together to form one large, patchwork ‘quilt’ of sorts. You’d be surprised how nice some of these murals turn out!
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