Miss Arty Pants: Day of the Dead Dioramas

I started introducing the lesson showing a slideshow of various Day of the Dead dioramas and we talked about what we saw. We discussed what an assemblage piece can look like but I stressed that the possibilities were endless. I explained what our process would be and left it very open ended. Students were allowed to partner up into groups or work alone. Each student (regardless if they worked alone or in a group) needed to create at least one skeleton from clay, everyone needed a theme and to include various details (requirements varied based on how many students worked on each diorama) keeping in with the Day of the Dead theme. All words were supposed to be in Spanish and there were to be various three-dimensional elements from mixed media.

We started making our skeletons out of air dry clay (I would use model magic in the future) so they would have time to dry before we painted them and we could work on our boxes while we had to wait that out. The 7th graders are a bit big to gather around one small table for a demonstration, so I've started making these demo videos to play for them...it's so much easier for them to see this on the projector. This video is simply about forming a skeleton shape from clay and how to give them facial expressions

Last but not least, as I promised in my previous post here, these are a few of the photos from our 7th Grade Day of the Dead Dioramas. The photos don't do them justice! The students did a great job transforming their boxes into dioramas!