Time for some sunshine...Mexican Sun Designs with Yarn 4th grade

Back from Spring Break and the wind is still chilly! We started working on these sun designs before break when the weather was dark and cold, hoping to brighten things up.  This week 4th graders are finishing their suns which have involved several steps and some interesting information.

First we traced around a paint mixing tray to get a 7 " circle in the center of a 12 x 12 " square of white drawing paper.  We then added rays around the circle.  I told them not to make the rays too small or wiggly as they had to be able to cut them out later.

 

The next step was to draw a face on the sun.  We looked at some Mexican Sun Face designs on the projection screen and learned that the sun is a popular symbol in Mexican art.  They added a face inside the circle, drawing the features large. To help make everything stand out the students traced with black permanent marker.  We then discussed what colors they might use to make people feel warm when they looked at our designs. Using crayons to color hard and waxy, we made our sun designs colorful.

My intern and I love the way all the suns have their own personality!  This is a crayon resist project so the next step was to use watercolor paint over our crayons. Then we let them dry.
                   

The last but very important step was adding some yarn to our suns.  We looked at yarn paintings from Mexico, they are very complex and colorful! Mexican folk artists use beeswax and yarn but we used white glue and tried not to get our fingers sticky by using a small stick to guide the yarn.

 We cut around our suns and glued them onto colorful tagboard. The sun designs turned out looking warm and colorful and creative! Good job 4th graders!