5th Grade: Fall Leaves & Wind Matisse Collage

5th graders finally finished their fall collages, just in time for winter! I will be starting this same project with a couple classes that are behind next week, and we will be using cool colors and cut-paper snowflakes instead of leaves.  This can really be done for any season!  First, we looked at a a powerpoint about Matisse and his cut outs, and discussed geometric and organic shapes.  After the powerpoint, students filled one whole page in their sketch books with organic shapes, and one whole page with geometric shapes. They also did sketches of various types of leaves (I had tons of visuals, books, printouts, and real leaves for them to look at).  The next class students chose 6 different colors of rectangles (4.5x6") to glue down onto 12x16" black paper (overlapping the rectangles).  Next they chose a 7th color rectangle to create 3 organic leaf shapes. With their scraps from their leaves they made organic wind-like shapes to glue in between.  We discussed good composition and layout briefly. They had to have three leaves and at least 7 pieces of wind  For the border shapes, they drew a wavy line down the middle of 2 different long strips of paper, cut down the middle on their line, and glued these four long curvy strips onto the back of the black paper so they were sticking out like a border.  Then the whole thing was glued onto a large piece of construction paper (overall the size of these are 16x21").