Materials needed:

ruler

magazines or colored paper

smooth brown paper

glue (or wallpaper paste works well)

paint brush

A mosaic is a pattern or picture made by using small pieces of varyingly colored material. Making mosaics is an ancient craft with a rich history. The earliest mosaics that we know about were made about 3000 B.C. by the Sumerians in ancient Mesopotamia, now Iraq. Arrangements of colored clay pegs were pressed into walkways. The Egyptians used small pieces of colored materials and stones to decorate walls, furniture, jewelry and other decorative objects. Stones and pebbles were used by the Ancient Greeks to create permanent designs. The Romans cut natural stone into regular cubes and used them to build pictures on walls and floors. These early mosaics used natural colors.

The Byzantines in the sixth century decorated their churches with richly colored ceramic tiles. Mosaic is also used in Islamic art. The fourteenth century palace of the Alhambra in Granada, Spain is a magnificent example of geometric mosaics.

Children enjoy creating mosaic decorations for different holidays and festivities of the year.

Easter - egg with ribbon around it and a fluffy chicken or rabbit.
Independence Day - flag of the stars and stripes
Halloween - gourds, pumpkins, jack-o-lantern
Thanksgiving Day - basket of fruits and a turkey
Christmas - a big star, Christmas tree with lights and tinsel.

Old magazines are a wonderful source of rich color, and work well for this project.  Tear paper against a ruler into approximately 1" wide strips, and then into 1" squares.

Don’t cut the paper, because it gives you too hard an edge.

Draw a simple design on a large paper, i.e. star, angel, tree, etc.

If your picture has a background (such as a blue sky or green grass), it is a good ideas to to place the squares covering the background first.

There are several different ways to handle the pasting:

1. A small area of the brown paper can be covered with paste, and then you could apply the small paper squares.

2. Apply the wallpaper paste to a sponge, and you could moisten each square with paste before sticking it down.

3. You could brush glue on the back of each piece before applying.

This mosaic was created by a young girl after a day of collecting stones at the beach.