Our THAGS (Three Honored and Great Subjects- Word, Form, and Song) this week are all centered in Ancient Egypt. The Word requirement of our THAGS has been met by reading selections from Roger Lancelyn Green's Tales of Ancient Egypt aloud to the kids. Song has been filled with Google images of ancient Egyptian musical instruments (it gets better from here, I promise), and for our Form studies, we read about ancient Egyptian art and made Egyptian profile portraits.
We had a lot of fun with these projects. To create each child's profile, I just took a photo of each kid in front of a white wall, then erased the background, upped the contrast and changed the resulting silhouette to a pale orangey color (which didn't photograph great with my phone). After gluing the silhouette to black paper, the kiddos made elaborate headdresses based on our study of Egyptian art. They used oil pastels which stands out fairly well on the black paper, though, again, it's hard to tell with these pics.
As you can tell, the older the child, the more historically accurate the headdress. Our 3-year old ended up drawing broccoli and monster trucks on his. ;) Even though the older children probably got more out of this project, the little ones enjoyed it a lot. In fact, I was kind of jealous that I didn't think of making myself one. I think it's pretty whole-family friendly. It could also be made more complex for older children. I've seen other versions of Egyptian faces projects that use gold tempera or acrylic paint and more sharpies, collage materials, etc. When we do this again, we'll take more time to design and execute our artwork. But, for our first THAGS art appreciation/ form project, I call it a success!
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