Mexico

Our class is wrapping up our study of Mexico! This has been a wonderful unit of study, made even better by our pen pal partnership with a class from Monterrey, Mexico, with whom we have been emailing and Skyping for several weeks. Throughout our reading and study during the last month we learned about weather, food, clothing, holidays, animals, mapping and geography, native people long ago and people in Mexico today, and much more! Student's "lap books" (their folders full of work from the unit) will be going home tomorrow so that you can ask your child about many of the interesting things they learned.

The week before break we made Amate bark paintings in the style of some of Mexico's native people's. Some of the photos below show students working on these. The original Amate paintings we used as examples are pictures painted in bright colors on paper made from the bark of Amate trees. We used brown paper and fluorescent paint to model our paintings after the originals. Students chose things found in nature such as birds, cactus, the sun, etc and painted them in threes on their paper. We will hang these on the wall outside our classroom for a while before sending them home.

One of the essential questions in our unit of study has been, "How are we and the place we live similar to and different from Mexico and its people." Now that we have learned so much about Mexico and met people there (through Skype and email) we took some time to make a Venn Diagram listing similarities and differences we have noticed between the people and places! It has been wonderful learning for us to see that we have so many things in common with our neighbor to the south but also many things that make us unique. You can see the beginning of our Venn Diagram work in one of the photos below. There are also photos of kids working on parts of their lap books including maps, the Mexican flag, passports, and more!

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