Another Bad Hair Day

During this thanksgiving holiday, the first graders decided that we should look at the Native American totem carvers for inspiration.  We learned that a totem pole is an object representing Native family kinships and stories.  We also learned that the totem pole carvers could be quite the jokesters and love to carve images and symbols that told funny stories.

As we discussed the bold lines and symmetry in the Totem Pole carvings, we can not help but notice the hand-tooled textures in the wood. This leads to a discussion about human-made objects and machine-made mass produced objects.  We watched two videos, one of a totem pole being carved using traditional hand-carved methods, and another video of a CNC machine milling a sculpture out of a piece of wood.

Students then set out to make a figure telling the funny story of a bad hair day and were asked to draw an oval for the face and a variety of lines radiating out from it.  We then broke out white oil pastels and drew shapes and patterns between the shapes made by the radiating lines to give the look of things getting stuck in our bad hair.

Out came the watercolors  to add some zest to the project and then we finished it off by outlining our lines with a black oil pastel.  The results, as always were fantastic.  Our next step is to bend them into a half-tube shape and stack them like a totem pole!