Hot afternoons are a great time for indoor art activities. For my daughter, who loves to draw – one of the best afternoon activities is to sit down with a pile of paper, her much loved and used crayons, markers and pencils to create works of art that tell everything from jokes to stories to abstract mysteries that wouldn’t look out of place in a cubist’s museum.
That being said, the following activity came to life when she made the comment about the funny looking person she’d seen at the grocery store. I wasn’t sure what she meant by funny looking – but she pointed to the Indian woman who had a red dot in the center of her forehead and was dressed in a traditional sari.
Cassidy described her as funny looking, but also very pretty. So when we came home from the store, I challenged her to draw the faces she saw in her daily life. She wanted to take it a step further; she wanted to make masks. So started the funny face collection. The funny faces are built from construction paper. She uses all different kinds in order to make the right shades and shapes.
She uses different eye colors and works hard to shape the eyes just right; some faces are longer than others – some are rounder with chubbier cheeks, every one fascinates her. She uses everything from more construction paper to yarn to old yellow twine to make the different styles of hair. She likes to take jeweled stickers to make jewelry and she uses heavy markers in lieu of make-up.
For her Indian woman, she borrowed swatches of my fabric in order to make the headdress and the clothing. Each face she makes is different and no two are the same. For a while there, she used to take the faces and have them talk to each other and she names them.
Recently, she’s asked me to give her names that go for the different types of faces. She’s looking for cultural identity and to that end we’re doing research into different cultures so she can choose her own names for her different funny faces.
We look at different faces now, wherever we go – she looks for faces that are different and she loves to go up and ask where these faces are from and what their names are. Most parents can attest to the fact that faces fascinate their kids – creating funny faces is both a lot of fun and extremely educational.
What do your children like to do when it comes to learning about other cultures?