Dia de los Muertos

Today we launched our new theme, Traditions at Home and Around the World, with a celebration of the Mexican Holiday, Dia de los Muertos. We began our Circle Time with a reading of John Updike’s poem, “November,” and relished the fact that we’re still wearing short sleeves even into November.

I introduced a collection of Latin percussion instruments and asked the kids to guess what part of the world these instruments came from—the kids guessed either “African” or “Spanish” and then settled on Spanish. We looked at an atlas to see where Spanish is spoken and traced the journey of Columbus from Spain to Latin America. We then looked at some pages in the book Children Just Like Me Celebrations (by Unicef) that showed how families in Mexico celebrate the holiday by cleaning up the cemetery and holding a party there at night with music, food, and flowers. Lydia and I shared the ofrenda we made on my family piano to honor my departed sister Sara and my great-grandma Polly.

We then played a musical circle game with Jose-Luis Orozco’s song, “Dia de los Muertos” and a variety of Latin percussion instruments. The children danced in a circle, and when the music stopped, they would look behind them and if there was an instrument there, they’d pick it up and play along with the song. We added one instrument at a time in this way until each child had an instrument, and then they swapped around so everyone had a turn with each instrument.

For our snack, I made my dad’s special treat which he called “Mexican donuts” when I was growing up. (They’re simply tortillas heated over the open flame & buttered then sprinkled with cinnamon-sugar and rolled up). Yum.

During exploratory time, all the kids decided to work on their illustrations of their “Favorite Things” poem. Most are nearing completion of this long-term project and are quite happy with their individual books-to-be.

For our art lesson today, Ms. Spramani introduced the craft of paper-mache’ (a popular Mexican folk art). We decided to make Mexican “tree of life” sculptures using a paper bowl and toilet paper roll as the basis for the paper-mache’ sculpture. Tomorrow, we’ll paint these and in the next art class we’ll add clay figurines to complete the project.