Installation Art at the Beach

The beach is the perfect setting for nurturing the natural collector in your child.  Kids can spend hours collecting rocks, shells, pieces of shells and the treasured ocean-tumbled bits of glass known as sea glass.  Pockets and buckets fill and collections on display soon cover porch rails, shelves and tables in beach houses.  What to do with all these treasures?

Collections provide a great opportunity for young children to practice sorting.  Choose your categories, then wash and sort your treasures by color, type, size or shape.  Sorting by color can be particularly interesting as you begin to notice the colors of the beach - tans, pinks and whites of shells and the occasional green or gold of rocks or beach glass.

Perhaps there are some shells or rocks that are best displayed wet or in shallow water to really see their color sparkle.

Encourage your child to play with his or her collection, arranging pieces in a patch of sand, a tray or on a plate or frisbee.  What sort of designs can you make with your different objects.  Perhaps a line of color or arrange shapes to look like faces.  

This can be a great chance to practice patterning alternating shells and rocks or different shapes and colors depending on your collection. Take pictures as you go and see how many different ideas you can create with these raw materials.

Much like sand castles, beach collection installations can be as beautiful for their fleeting quality as for their creative fun.  Create a design in the sand with your treasures and leave it for others to enjoy or to watch the ocean and wind take its toll.

With a camera in hand, beach installations can be preserved without having to haul every piece home.  For those really special treasures a shallow box or tray for arranging and displaying can enable your child to continue to arrange and create new designs inside and at home.

If you do want to create a lasting display with your creations, look for a shallow wooden box or tray and glue favorite finds.  Perhaps your child will label the scientific names or take a more creative angle and create a scene or design with the pieces.  Enjoy creatively bringing back just a bit of your wonderful beach vacation.