Silhouettes About Me: Family Holiday Project or Back to School Project

Each year, I like to do something different for the gift the students give to their parents during the holiday season.  I like to keep it less holiday focused and more family focused, as I truly don't know what holidays the kids celebrate (or don't celebrate) at home.  Because of this, I tend to steer clear of ornaments or traditional Christmas-themed faire.   So this year, I decided to do a Silhouette All About Me.  This project, which we did for our holiday family gift this year, actually would be awesome for the beginning of the year or Mother's/Father's Day...and I think I may switch it up next year and do just that!  Anyway, here is what we did.

We began by brainstorming some activities that the kids liked to do.  These could be anything from playing a musical instrument to reading to playing video games to joining in a kickball game.  The only thing I asked them to really think about is how could they show themselves doing that particular activity. Once the brainstorm was complete, the kids took a plain piece of white copy paper and drew the three activities in SILHOUETTE.  

Then, using my camera, I took a picture of the student posing in each of the three activity poses.  I made sure when taking the picture that their arms and legs were separated and exaggerated.  For example, if they were playing the recorder, I had them raise their back arm just slightly more than their front arm, hold the recorder out straight, and separate their legs one in front of the other.  That way, when it was turned into a silhouette and all black, each part of their body and the recorder could be identified.

I uploaded this to Canva and then used the editing tools on there to remove the background and make the silhouette black.  Admittedly, this took me a LONG time to figure out how to do properly, but once I did, it wasn't too long to get all of the pictures looking correct.

Here is a quick video I made showing you step by step how I turned the pictures into silhouettes.

I downloaded each silhouette and put them into a power point slide that I had preset to have two boxes in them.  You can get the file here on Google Slides.  I just input the png that Canva gave me and resized it to be in the middle of the box.

Next, each student received their pictures and I had them draw around them to fill in the details of their activity.  These were to be colorful and pretty looking, and boy did the kids not disappoint. They looked STUNNING in real life with the black silhouette and the colorful backgrounds.  They were just gorgeous.

Next, the kids cut out the boxes, glued these frames I bought from Amazon onto them and then glued those onto piece of card stock cut to the correct size.  

The sizes of the white card stock for the background are as follows:

For 1 frame:  8" x 6"

For 2 frames:  8" x 11"

For 3 frames:  8" x 16"

I then cut an additional black piece of card stock as a background to it all, since I just thought that looked nicer.  For those dimensions, I just added 1 inch all around.

For 1 frame:  9" x 7"

For 2 frames:  9" x 12"

For 3 frames: 9" x 17"

I attached a piece of yarn (as that is what I had...I think ribbon would have looked nicer) and it became a hanging frame to give to families as a beautiful keepsake gift.   There is just something about silhouettes that makes everything look fancy.