I love making murals and posters for our holidays as a collaborative art project that all the kids work on together, as well as a fun holiday decoration, so this year’s holiday poster is a Shavuot Collage Mural. I love that each person in our family is represented (like our Mount Sinai, The Ten Commandments and Us poster from a couple years ago) and that they also had the opportunity to make their own flowers to help Mount Sinai, and our house, bloom!
What You’ll Need
- Butcher paper or poster board
- Cupcake Liners
- Crayons, colored pencils or markers
- Glue
- Person templates or white paper
- Green paper, tissue paper, or magazine pages
- 10 Commandment print out, or a marker for writing them
Putting It Together
- Hang up your butcher paper or poster board.
- Color your cupcake liners to create flowers.
- Invite each person to draw themselves, create self-portraits, on the person templates or on a piece of white paper. If using paper, cut around the self-portrait.
- Tear up the green paper, tissue paper or magazine pages into smaller pieces.
- Create Mount Sinai by gluing the green pieces of paper in a mountain shape on the butcher paper or poster board.
- Add your self-portrait people at the base of Mount Sinai.
- Glue or write the 10 Commandments around the mountain.
- Glue your cupcake flowers on the mountain and wherever else you want!
Finished & Loving It!
Creating murals for each holiday has become one of our family traditions. Each year I want them to be at least slightly different so it feels new and fun for the kids, but still have the same meaningful learning and impact.
I love when kids create self-portraits. I’ve watched my oldest children’s drawings of themselves evolve from scribbles to realistic drawings and love it. Apparently this year everyone else was on a video game kick and they all did their self-portraits as video game versions of themselves. Definitely a snapshot of where we are in our lives right now!
Tearing paper, whether from magazines, construction paper, or tissue paper, is a wonderful activity for little hands. It strengthens their hand muscles which is important for drawing, writing and cutting, as well as a whole bunch of other practical life skills. It’s also a great way to reuse and repurpose old magazines. My grandma gave us a box of old magazines that she had been storing and they are perfect for our process art experiences!
I love the idea of using cupcake liners to create flowers. The liners already have that fanned out flower shape so it feels like a natural connection to me, but still allows creativity for the children in how they color it.
Because I already had my 10 Commandments cards accessible, I printed another version for a visual representation (and repetition!) of the commandments. It is not important to me that they memorize the order of the commandments, but that they learn the meaning for each one.
I added a special Shavuot quote to our mural: “In every generation each of us should feel as if he or she had personally stood at Sinai and received the divine revelation.” It reminds us all why we do self-portraits for these Shavuot art projects. It is also a beautiful reminder of this connection to our ancestors through all the ages. And that we have a personal, and individual, connection to G-d and this promise.
I love that we will be able to see this special Shavuot Collage Mural the rest of this week, reminding us of the holiday and its meaning every time we take a look!
We have a whole page dedicated to Shavuot, our Shavuot Hub. Check it out! It will include some of the Shavuot activities we do this year, as well as the activities we’ve done in previous years.
And don’t forget our Shavuot Montessori-Style 3 Part Cards, and our Shavuot Activity Pack, a wonderful way to introduce the holiday!
Check out our recommended Shavuot books from our Bookshop.org Shop!
The following sites are amazing resources for learning more about this holiday:
Chag Sameach!!
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