To welcome our 6th-grade classes and get to know the new students better, we proposed a special icebreaker activity: drawing a backpack filled with passions, interests, memories, and adjectives that describe each of us. This workshop is a great opportunity to develop self-awareness and work on personal orientation, while also allowing students to practice their graphic and expressive skills. Besides helping us memorize names and discover everyone’s talents, the final page will become the personalized cover for the Art notebook that will accompany us throughout our first year of Middle School.
In the file available for purchase below, you will find four ready-to-use resources: two worksheets designed to create a personalized cover for art binders or notebooks (one with clear instructions and captions to distribute or project, and one with the backpack outline to decorate), and two additional worksheets created as an icebreaker activity for students to get to know each other and share personal facts.”
Materials Needed:
- Photocopy of “The Welcome Backpack” worksheet
- Pencil and eraser
- Colored markers or colored pencils
- Ruler
To begin, we distributed the worksheet to each student and read the instructions together, discovering how each section of the backpack corresponded to a specific aspect of our personality to be shared through shapes and words.
Using pencils, we started filling in the spaces of the backpack by customizing every detail: drawing our passions on the pockets, writing descriptive adjectives on the straps, and placing our favorite objects inside the main compartment.
IFinally, we traced the outlines and colored our compositions using markers and colored pencils, taking care to make the artwork vibrant, complete, and well-crafted for our new cover.
Here is our gallery of finished backpacks: each artwork is unique and tells us something special about the person who created it!
