Back to School Photo Collage Ideas

A collage can make a beautiful gift and a meaningful piece of wall art. It’s a way to combine creativity, artistic vision, and photography into a form where you literally can’t go wrong. It’s one of the most fun and effective ways to showcase not just a moment but a combination of many moments. While a single photo might preserve the memory of an instant, great photo collage ideas can preserve your memories for a much longer period of time in one cohesive piece of wall art.

That’s what makes photo collages a great back to school project for kids of all ages. Depending on the approach taken, collage can celebrate new adventures or honour the memories of a great year past. Either way, it’s a load of fun. Here are some quick ideas for collages at any age.

Photo Collages for Young Kids

Heading off to school for young kids can be an exciting time. Kids get to see the friends and teachers they love, and every year means new friends and new experiences.

A great way to create a collage is to gather all of the photos from your summer activities. Use your photos of holidays, parties, all the little adventures that families get into. Use them to make either a digital collage that can be passed around as a link or a physical one (either printed professionally as a canvas or glass piece or glued together in the true crafty way) your child can show off to friends and teachers in response to ‘What did you do over the school holidays?’

Photo Collages for Teenagers and Young Adults

Older kids might lose some of their enthusiasm for craft projects. But that doesn’t mean they can’t use the power of collage to preserve their memories. For young adults going off to university, it’s often their first taste of freedom and responsibility. The friends they make at university are often friendships they’ll have for life.

Photo collage ideas for older kids get more complex. Older kids can use photos of anything – friends, yes, but also landscapes, objects, pets or photos of their favourite places. The point isn’t necessarily the subjects in each photo, but the moments from their lives. Moments that can be grouped together to create one cohesive artwork.

You can choose to build your photo collage one photo at a time. Or it could be a project for that first lazy week after exams are finished. Either way, it will be something kids and young adults will treasure for the rest of their lives. Then later as they move from place to place, their collages can be taken with them. They will look at their collage and be reminded of all these moments that would otherwise have been lost to time.

Whether the collage is a digital artefact that lives on a server or is turned into a gorgeous physical print (and if you want to see how we do collage, click here and let’s get started), it’s a fun and powerful way to define your experiences – and remember them.