Dia De Los Muertos

The second graders have been working on this project for quite a while. I did not anticipate it taking so long, but due to holidays and scheduling, we are just winding down with it. Dia De los Muertos is celebrated on November 1st and 2nd so it was timely that we were still working on them. I introduced the project with a prezi, which is my new favorite thing ever. You can view mine here and feel free to use it if you ever do this project. The kids loved the whole thing and they were so excited to make their own Calaveras.

We began by looking at lots of pictures and I had the students draw their designs on white drawing paper , then out line in sharpie and then color in with oil pastels.

Then they cut out the pieces and glued them to black paper. I gave them some fancy sequins for embellishment and some of the classes got to use GLITTER. Hooray for glitter, it brings squeals of delight to my kids, not so much delight to the custodians.

Overall, I feel it was really successful, the children were really interested in the story behind the celebration and they loved looking at the pictures of the altars and the parades and of course the sugar skulls.

The Princess and the Pea

So the second graders were doing a unit on fairy tales and I wanted to do an interdisciplinary project based on one of them. I chose "The Princess and the Pea". We read a version of the story and the students got to work. Prior to the project, I collected a ton of old wallpaper books which came in handy for this. The students used strips of wallpaper as the mattresses, we all decided to hide a 'pea' somewhere in the stack of mattresses, I had them draw it, but next time, I might just use a hole puncher and some green paper and have them use that. They loved that part. Once they had their stack of mattresses, they used long strips of brown paper to create the bedposts. I gave them a little rectangle of paper for them to create their Prince or Princess and I used metallic gold paper for a crown.