Welcome to the CAVE

Our awesome Mrs. P had asked me to run a session for the social studies group for the 6th graders.

Topic: Prehistoric Art aka Cave Paintings

It took me a week to figure out how to go about making a lasting impression on these 11 and 12 year olds, which is NOT an easy task when you are competing with MineCraft, iPhones and so on.
It had to be BIG, COOL and FUN!

So this is what I did.

I set up the tables in a half-circle and covered all tables with drop cloths.

The  kids, I mean young ladies and gentlemen, walked into a pitch black room, ancient Aboriginal music was playing and I had used some incense to make the room smell a bit musky.

I had found a great report by a young lady online (click here) which explained the upper paleolithic period very well and we looked at some examples of cave art.

At first the kids thought that cave art was easy and looked like young children's doodles but once we chatted about living 40,000 BP, having no Michaels to purchase art materials, no online tutorials, no spoken language (at least as much we know), no electricity and no snack machine, in case you got hungry while "coloring", they started to appreciate these un-doubtfully amazing masterpieces much more.

To give them a little taste of how it felt painting in the dark, on cave walls, with little materials I asked them to grab some paper (we used brown paper bags), crumple it up, take a piece of charcoal and  move into the CAVE (aka under the tables).

We turned off the light to let them stare into the dark for a while and then dimmed the light so they could have some light to work with.
Again the prehistoric music was sounding through the room and all we could see were lots of legs and heard lots of giggles :)

After they had completed their charcoal drawings I gave them brown tempera paint thickened with baby cereal which had turned the paint into a paste like consistency and the students were asked to use their fingers to add some color.

The last step was to add some gold speckles to add contrast (and bling).

After they had completed their cave art we asked the students to leave their handprint (often found in prehistoric art, presumably as a signature of the cave artists) on a large piece of butcher paper.

et voila ... 99 amazing master pieces.

Mrs. Maria (our wonderful, always ready to help, assistant angel, and I spent Friday afternoon gluing  the students art work onto the butcher paper pieces (which we also crumpled up prior to the gluing to give it the cave wall effect) and then decorated the hall way with it.

This is one of my favorites! 

A very realistic looking piece of prehistoric art.

It was A LONG day in the cave for me!

I entered at 8:00 am and did not find my way out until 5:00 pm BUT it was so worth it and we had a BLAST!
I could hear the kids say "This is so cool!", "Awesome!" and "I want to do this every day!" and right there it was well worth all the effort!

THANK YOU to all CAP volunteers who helped transform the room and prep materials.
Again, THANK YOU Maria for your tireless efforts and help! I could not have gotten the project up on the wall without your help!

And last but not LEAST well done my dear Curtner 6th Graders!
I had a blast with you and can't wait for our next excursion into art history!

Coming up next, we'll have a little Powwow with our 4th Graders.
I just need to figure out how to turn 17 into a giant tepee :)

Cave Art Attack was a huge SUCESS!!!