Collagraph print hearts in 3rd grade

Collagraph printing combines collage with printmaking - gluing textures and shapes on to a printing plate, in this case a mat board scrap, and rolling with ink to be printed in multiples. This is a good time to clean out the scrap boxes, because you can use lots of materials - yarn, sandpaper, tagboard, corrugated cardboard, foil, and my favorite - craft foam.

In these examples, we used some discarded craft foam leftovers that created a negative shape heart, or students chose to rearrange into a new design. We also used discarded corrugated paper bulletin board border from decades ago, pulled from the trash bin last spring :).

This lesson took two class periods - in the first, we assembled the plates and selected our printing papers. In the second, we watched the demo and printed our papers. here is the way we set the tables up with "clean corners" for rubbing the prints and "messy middles" for rolling ink.