Guatemala Mission 2011

Our team

I just got back from my third Mission trip to the Highlands of Guatemala. We do a teaching mission there with a great group of people. We painted a fun mural and taught the students art. We also brought in computers for the teachers and hooked them onto the internet and got them email addresses!

Posing with giggly second graders.

This is a view of the outside of the school pre-mural.

Teaching art with my interpreter and co-teacher!

Students helping out with the mural painting. That's me with the pink hat on;-)

The finished project. "care for the earth and She will care for you" was our catch phrase.

Our morning view, lovely.

A tag-along on the 1 1/2 hour truck ride off the mountain.

Holding a large piece of wood for our break as we kept stalling out.

I love the Guatemalan people and as you can see from the pics the children are not only beautiful they are full of love and laughter. After the mission trip we took our truck drive down the mountain and then picked up our bus for the rest of the trip to Antigua. Antigua has the some of most incredible buildings, food and shopping in the world. The markets are color-filled and vibrant. We took side trips to a coffee plantation and to Tikal, Mayan ruins in the northern rain forest, breathtakingly beautiful.

A cloud is falling onto the city of Antigua. It is surrounded by three volcanoes.

The fountain at the city square.

Picking up wood for fires from the coffee plantation.

Raw, fresh coffee beans.

 

Tikal, one of the many pyramids at this 256 square mile national park.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Mural

In addition to teaching art, I also sponsor the Leo Club, which is a service organization, and the art club. A few weeks ago with the three other teachers who help with the Leo Club and a group of the middle school kids painted a colorful mural on the multi-purpose room (cafeteria) wall of our school. This is how it went.

The beauty is that it is an ongoing project....now for the next wall, already have words spewing out and images of children romping in my head;-)

Yummy colors make all the difference!

The paint crew

Finishing touches.

The mural to be added onto-later

6th grade loom weaving

I really wanted to get my students weaving. Although I had limited supply of looms I decided to go ahead and have my sixth graders weave. I split my two classes and had the one try the paper plate weaving and the B-day class did the loom weaving with 9x13 inch cardboard looms. We learned vocabulary and used yarn to create the weft or vertical strips through which you actually do the weaving.
Luckily my sister works in a  quilting store so I had a bunch of colorful material strips on hand and decided to use fabric rather than yarn for the weaving to make the process go faster and also to give the weaving some visual interest. The fabric was used for the warp.

Here are some of the results. I let some students add beads in if they wanted to.

The bulletin board

Everyone had different color choices which created nice effects

This student found gold ribbon in a fabric bag and added beads.

Super job by Ezekiel J.

Some students had more difficulty with the actual concept of weaving but the end product looked freeform and beautiful.

Erick went with a Carribbean blue theme.

Ezekiel D. was a natural at this process.

paper plate weaving

My sixth graders did two types of weavings. 

I first saw this weaving technique on themanualescanigo.blogspot.com/. I love, love, love this blog.

One class tried the paper plate weaving. They turned out pretty well. We had a bit of trouble trying to regulate the distance of the cuts for stringing the weft in the paper plates. The theory is that the number of strings in the plate should be uneven so that when you go around you naturally end up weaving in an over and under pattern with no issue. If your weft strings are an even number, you will have to remember to alternate or skip going over  (or under) a weft every time you complete a circle or the weaving will not alternate "over and under" and it will start to bunch up. This can be confusing for the students.

The students were instructed to draw a pattern with colored markers to coordinate and to try to cut out a little pattern from the edges to make the design more interesting.

Here are the some of the paper plate weavings.