I don’t know how common it is in US schools, but here in Italy, at least when I was a child in the 1980s, it was quite common to create colorful paper mosaics during art class: you’d buy these colored, shiny paper sheets, which you’d cut into tiny squares and glue onto drawings to color them.

Admittedly, it was a messy job, with most children getting dirty, sticky fingers from the glue, and the paper mosaic pieces being of a variety of irregular shapes, rather than perfect squares.