The Day of the Dead, a Mexican holiday celebrated on November 1 and 2, was fascinating to my third graders. The special areas team at my school has been working hard to support homeroom teachers’ reading goals, so I distributed a card to each student with a fact and accompanying photo about the holiday and gave them a couple minutes of silent reading time to learn their facts. Then they had to share their facts within small groups. As a class, we made a T-chart on my ActivBoard showing what students already knew about the Day of the Dead before they got to class on the left and what they learned from the cards on the right. (I’m fortunate to have 50-minute class periods, which allows me to sometimes do activities like this in addition to the steps of the art project.)
Then students drew their skulls with pencils on black construction paper. I showed them how to draw a basic skull by following these steps: (1) Draw a big circle with a slightly more narrow “U” shape connected to the bottom. (2) Erase the part of the circle between the U. (3) Draw circles for eyes and a triangle for the nose. (3) Draw a straight line across the middle of the U and then add a few short perpendicular lines to make the teeth. After that, students could add decorations and embellishments to their skulls. Some of the informational cards they had studied had images of candy skulls and other skull-themed artwork, which gave students some ideas for this step. Finally, students carefully traced all pencil lines with glue.
The next class session was all about how to use soft pastels. Students blended colors with their fingers inside the sections created with the dried glue lines, taking care to stay neat and not overwork the pastels. Everyone loved the way it looked when they blended two colors together.
Fifty Reds 