fifth grade: cultural heritage masks.

For the past two years I've been developing a project for my fifth graders to help them get in touch with their family's ancestry and history. I talk to them about the importance of masks throughout history and how each culture would use a mask for a specific purpose. The masks my fifth graders create are inspired by their family's cultural background. They use a culture from their family and create a mask inspired by the facts they discovered during their research at home. The project is lengthy, but fun and informative. The important thing is what the artist takes away at the end of growing and gaining knowledge of their family and it's history. I love that my little artists get the opportunity to talk with their parents or grandparents about where they came from as a family. I feel the importance of this is so full of value. Living in the U.S.A. as a large melting pot brings together so many different people from around the world. It's so neat for my students to get to see that.

My cultural mask lesson is a papier-mache project. I took on papier-mache in my first year of teaching. Some called me crazy, but because I did this I was able to work out kinks and dysfunctional moments and create a flowing system that allows my students the most of their 50 minute art lesson.

My students go through a five step process to make their mask:

1. creating the mold or structure of their mask with newspaper strips and a gallon milk jug
2. constructing and building 3-D forms with news paper, paper towel tubes, and tape to make eyes, nose, snouts, ears, horns, etc.
3. adding paper-towel or white paper layers to preserve the new structures they built
4. drawing the design + painting the mask with cultural references (color, designs, etc.)
5. (optional) choosing to add extra material to the mask with reference to the culture

                                       (step one)                                                      (step two)

(step three)

                               (step four)                                                                    (step four)

(step five)

-teacher example-

I feel my students really enjoy this project and even though it is messy and lengthy, it is well worth all the effort to let my little artists experience a type of sculptural art. This project saves the art budget a lot of money as well since this is a recyclable materials project (milk jugs, newspapers, paper-towel tubes, etc.). It's a lot of fun to watch the vast majority of them succeed and grow while making a cultural mask in three-dimensional form.