Throughout part of our school year, we began saving a few pieces of the children’s artwork so to have a sampling of each child’s work that we could display in our simple preschool art gallery…
Here’s a look at our graduation day with our art gallery display!
It is always amazing to me how different artwork looks once you frame it or mount it on a colored background. It suddenly can change the look of the artwork from a blob of colors on paper to having the look of a valuable piece of fine art…
We decided to add the art gallery to our end of the year school graduation program and I am so glad we did. By having the art gallery included in our graduation day celebration, the parents, grandparents, friends, and family were able to all come to one event and see the amazing work my preschoolers had participated in creating throughout the school year…
The art gallery also gave the children something special to share with their parents and was a terrific way for each child to feel recognized by all of us. In our end of the year program, all the children in my class come and participate. Part of the evening is a short celebration of the graduates and part of the evening is a celebration of all the children…
To prepare our art display boards, I  purchased one cardboard display board from the Dollar Tree for each child. For each child’s board, we included the child’s portfolio, at least four pieces of artwork, and the child’s printed name….
Some of the artwork, we mounted on a complimenting color of construction paper. If needed, we cut the artwork down a bit to fit as long as we didn’t actually cut any of the artwork in the process. Once the artwork was ready to mount to the board, we used doubled backed packing tape to hold it in place so the parents could gently remove the artwork from their child’s board when they took the board home…
I wanted to use a variety of artwork such as 3D artwork (lid collages or button collages) as well as easel painting and other types of paintings on the boards. I have fellow teachers who place all the artwork into real frames for their art gallery but there was no way I could possibly to that so this approach worked really well for me and my parents loved it too…
Inside the children’s portfolios were items like their journals, samples of their drawings, small pieces of artwork, and anything else that would fit that we might have held onto over the school year…
The one thing I didn’t have time to do that I will be sure to add next year is a label identifying the process used to create each piece of artwork. After all, we all know that it the process is what really matters to young children so I want to be sure to highlight those processes next year. Â I will just have to start planning a little earlier…
So here is a little closer look at some of our art displays…
Let me know if you have any questions I can answer about the art gallery in the comments below! I am happy to answer them.
Available on Amazon