Emotional Skies (Art)
All Ages

For this activity you’ll need…

• Scissors
• Glue
• White paper
• *Butcher paper (optional)
• *Crayons or colored pencils
• *Writing utensil

Give kids a piece of paper to use as their canvas. Ideally, you want an oversized piece of rectangular-shaped butcher paper to allow for plenty of room, but regular 8 1/2 by 11 will also do if that’s all you have on hand.

Have kids draw a landscape scene on the bottom half of their paper–mountains, trees, a house, and so forth. With younger kids you might need to put a pencil mark as a guide to keep their doodles from taking up the whole page. Then color the remaining half blue like the sky.

Next have kids cut cloud shapes from separate pieces of white paper, then write a different emotion on each cloud: Happy, sad, angry, afraid, etc. Encourage them to color each cloud in the spirit of that emotion, then glue each cloud on the sky portion of their paper.

This art project is a visual representation of the idea that emotions are fleeting. They come and they go, floating in and out of our mind, just like puffy clouds moving across the sky. Negative emotions may cloud our life for a little while, but eventually they move on past, making way for blue sky and sunny feelings once again. Talk to kids about this concept as they work on their project.