Some children and young people find it more difficult to open up about their feelings and talk about their grief, and that’s completely normal. Our activities are designed to help grown-ups supporting these children and young people and provide a way to talk about feelings and emotions while getting crafty.

Creating window art is a fun, simple way to interact with the child while they’re busy getting hands on with the craft. You can then display their art in the window, which is great if you don’t want to stick things on your walls!

This activity also involves reflection and thinking about the person who has died. If you start the activity and the child is distressed or uncomfortable, you could try one of our other activities instead and revisit this at a later date. For more advice, please see our resources on supporting a bereaved child, where you will also find information on children's understanding of death at different ages. 

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You will need:

• Greaseproof or baking paper (preferably white so more light can get through)
• Coloured tissue paper
• PVA glue or glue stick
• Scissors (with help from a grown-up)
• Lollipop sticks or similar (optional)
• Paper or notebook
• Pencil

Instructions:

1. Start by cutting your greaseproof paper into the shape or the size you want; you could make a square, circle, heart shape. When using scissors, make sure a grown-up is there to help you.

2. Lay out your coloured tissue paper. If you have lots of different colours, you could start to select which you'd like to use and why. Different colours might represent something about the person who died, for example their hair colour, eye colour, favourite t-shirt, the colour of their car, or something they loved, like yellow sunshine or red strawberries. Take your time choosing these colours, this is a really important part of the activity.

3. Take the pencil and paper and create a colour code to remind you of your choices for your piece of art, e.g. green = they loved the park.

4. You can either rip the tissue paper into small pieces or ask a grown-up to help you cut it into shapes and small pieces.

5. Now you can create your collage! Ask a grown-up to help you use some glue to stick the tissue paper pieces to the greaseproof paper. You might decide to make shapes within your art, like a heart or smiley face, or you could create a mosaic collage.

6. Wait for all the bits of glue to dry – this might take a little bit of time – then you can tape your art to the window to let the sunlight shine through it. If you have lollipop sticks, you could create a frame for the edge of your art.

Every time the sun shines through you can remember all those details about your person by looking at the different colours you’ve chosen or the shape of your design. You can keep your colour code in your memory box or somewhere safe to remind you as well.

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Our short animated film suggests ways that children and young people can remember someone important to them who has died.