The Adelphi Project

Here are more of our fabulous paper mache animal masks from my 1st through 5th graders. In my lesson I touched on how masks have been used traditionally and why animals would be represented. I also introduced the idea of anthropomorphizing and examples of how it is used in art. I know that is a ridiculously big word but it is such a hook with kids- they love making things "human" and I didn't want the big word to scare us away from using it ;). So we spent one class period brainstorming how we would give an animal a human quality. They chose their animal, looked at Ranger Rick books to get ideas and sketched out how the animal would look with the human attribute they decided on.

Technically, I wanted them to learn something a little deeper than the usual so I had them build an armature out of newspaper and tape (then we added paper mache over that) instead of using a balloon. This was pretty difficult but in the end it was a very rewarding process and they really experienced how to build a form from scratch (great job kids!!!!).

Once the paper mache dried we painted them and then I had a variety of things they could glue and stick onto their masks. I drilled holes for the eyes and holes on the sides to tie around their heads if they wanted to. Seeing how excited they got when they were able to see their hard work come to fruition made the length of time this took to complete all worth it!!! I am SO incredibly proud of the students effort!!!

I added every mask to my Flickr stream (button is on the top, right of this blog) to share!