Saturday, June 21, 2014

Ancient Egypt

 2nd Grade:

Egyptian Portraits

2nd Graders studied Ancient Egypt. They looked at the history of King Tut, Egypt's youngest pharoah. King Tut's tomb was discovered in the 1930's and many of his riches were left intact. This is how we know so much about him. Students also studied Queen Cleopatra. She lived hundreds of years after King Tut. She was also very young when she inherited the throne..just a teenager. Her and her younger brother co-ruled Egypt for a time. She then became sole ruler. She married Mark Antony. Students looked at some coins with Cleapatra's head on them. It was interesting to see how the fashion was different back then compared to today. 

Students completed a step-by-step drawing of either King Tut or Cleapatra. We paid attention to accurate facial proportions. This was review for 2nd graders, as we'd introduced this last year in 1st when we did Matisse portraits. 

After drawing and tracing their portrait with a black sharpie, students painted their face with either bronze or gold tempera paint. Students painted the rest of their portrait with violet, red, blue and black tempera paint. I had some coloring sheets of both King Tut and Queen Cleapatra so students could see common accessories and fashion styles of the day. I also did step-by-step directions for doing a head-dress and hair.

Overall, this project took around 4 one-hr art classes to complete. It was one of our longer projects, but very fun and the results are amazing!

One unfortunate thing is many of my pics that I took from this project got inadvertantly lost when my home computer was being revamped. Fortunately, a few were saved (below). These also got to hang in the hallway for awhile so all students and teachers could appreciate them!


 Cleapatra and King Tut!











No comments:

Post a Comment