All About Me Magazine Name Art

Back-to-school is the perfect time for name art. Today's project lets kids introduce who they are through words and images cut from a magazine. The project incorporates reading skills (a great opportunity to practice scanning) with fine motor skills, a combination you don't find together often. 

All About Me Name Art

Materials: 

• magazines
• scissors
• construction paper or cardstock
• glue sticks

Steps: 

Select a magazine for your project. It should have plenty of large, colorful images, as well as lots of text. Good choices include magazines about travel, cooking, or nature. Special interest magazines can work too. I used the Visit California guide. 

Start by tearing out large images from the magazine that appeal to you. You'll need as many as there are letters in your name. Set them aside for now. 

Write your name in block letters on scratch paper and cut them out. You do not need to cut out the counters if you don't want to. I opted to leave them for the D and the Y in my name in order to give me more space for my words. 

Arrange the cut-out letters on the images you've chosen, moving each letter around to decide where it looks best. Then cut out the letters. You can see below that I wanted to incorporate the sunset and the crops in my letter Y. I positioned it midway between the two, avoiding the white text on the page. 

When all your letters are cut out, glue them to the construction paper background. As I was doing that, I decided my I needed to be dotted with a heart, even though it's a capital letter. Artistic license. 

Now, go through the magazine and scan for words that appeal to you. They can be any part of speech: adjectives that describe you, nouns that are things you like, and verbs that tell your favorite things to do. Arrange the words onto the letters however you'd like. I grouped them together in a way that was meaningful for me, paying attention to the colors to maintain balance. In the D and the Y, I concentrated words in the areas where I didn't cut out the counters in order to reinforce that shape. 

I love how my project turned out. It would be so much fun to see a whole classroom's worth of names and a great way to get to know each other through art.