How Has Storytelling Changed Over Time and Place - Cave Paintings
PYPCAVE PAINTING
How We Express Ourselves
In our Unit of Inquiry 'How We Express Ourselves', our central idea is one of the lines of inquiry is 'Storytelling has changed over place and time.'
During our Tuning-In process, my 4-5 year old students thought about stories they knew and the different ways we can tell them. We created a mind map on Canva to show our thinking.
Creative Cave Paintings
Using cardboard boxes and tables, we created a cave where students unleashed their creativity and drew their own cave pictures. We also experimented with spray bottles filled with paint and water to recreate ancient cave handprints on the 'cave wall'. Join us on this artistic journey!
Next we looked at our favorite characters and stories that we love to read and did a little show-and-tell. We talked about what these authors and illustrators use when they made these books. Then my little 4 and 5 year old Hong Kongers were asked a VERY big question. 'We use these these materials now, but how did people tell stories a long, long time ago?'. I know, that may be a difficult concept for them to think about, but it led us into a cave painting conversation and talked about why people used to paint in caves. I use an Ice Age clip to help explain this concept.
We also looked closely at some pictures of real cave paintings and talked about what we saw and why we thought it was drawn. What story do you think they are telling?
Next, our cave was made using cardboard boxes, tables, and masking tape, and we crawled inside to create our masterpieces. To give my students some examples of cave drawings to make their own story, I used Cave Doodles Inspiration for Cave Paintings Background Tutorial by Kater's Acre's.
The students had the option to create a story using the samples, or using their own pictures and imagination. I even had two students playing tic-tac-toe.
Our Cave HandPrints
While the students worked on their cave drawings in the cave, (while nature sounds played in the background) they were called one by one to add their hand print to our class cave wall to leave their mark, just like those had done around 10,000 years ago.
I filled spray bottles mixed with paint and water. They could choose from black, red, and orange. The spray bottles i used were a little tricky for them to use on their own, especially one handed, so I sprayed their hands for them. Next year, maybe I can find a way for them to spray their hands on their own, or at least have a friend spray their hand for them, and vice versa.
Check out our end result!
