Winning Futures – Inspiring and preparing youth to succeed through mentoring.

A great way to have mentees and students take ownership of their talents and strengths and to explore their values is to create a “Strengths and Talents Collage.” This fun and easy activity gives mentors, teachers and students a creative, hands-on activity to take part in collaboratively. All that’s needed is some poster board, scissors, glue sticks, a stack of old magazines and some creativity!

Here’s how the activity works:

1. Work with student teams of three or four (or, if wanted, individual students) to create lists of students’ personality traits, strengths and talents.
2. Give each student team a poster board, scissors, glue sticks and magazines.
3. Help students find images, words and other content that reflect or symbolize items on their lists to include on the poster board.
4. Each team will then take their chosen content and create a team collage by gluing the magazine cutouts onto the poster board.

When done, invite each team to stand and share with others the content of their poster and the significance of each of the items on it. These can be displayed in your classroom throughout the year and even added to or modified as the school-year progresses to reflect each team-members’ personal growth!

Many more lessons like these are outlined in Winning Futures’ “Achieving Success” workbook. Click on the “Purchase Books” button at left to learn more.