Mayan Jaguar Mural

Fellow Tennessean, Cassie Stephens's blog posts are a fantastic resource for elementary art teaching inspiration. I took this idea directly from her and she explains it WAY better. We even watched her tiger demo to create our jaguars.

The results at my school were very exciting and we modified it to match our ancient Mayan theme. There is a large Latinx population at my school and we offer the only dual language (Spanish/English) immersion programs in the state. It is very important to me to show artwork primarily from Latino and African American artists.

For this lesson, our second graders read Mario's Mayan Journey by Michelle McCunney and Rain Player by David Wisniewski on different days while we worked on the project.

First, we studied the element of art line and covered an orange or brown sheet of construction paper with warm color and brown crayons with as many lines as we could think of. These papers made a nice textured base on which to draw our jaguar. Next, we created the jaguars using the demo linked above. Cutting them out was fun and we occasionally had to do "surgery" on amputated tails or whiskers.

The next part was scary. I hesitated for a week, but then jumped into it. We painted for the first time. In collaborative groups. Eeek! We practiced some quick procedures - which direction we are expected to walk around the room. How to share. This time we used liquid tempera. (I usually use tempera cakes and have a system for students to collect and clean up their own cups and brushes.) So with the liquid tempera, I created four palettes with green, yellow, blue, and white (for the "leaves") and one palette for an extra large class which required an extra paint station with no green in it (for the night sky). I gave them two brushes per color and told them to not mix the colors, but to switch brushes when they wanted a new color. This mostly worked and was primarily so I could re-use the palettes each day without wasting paint and muddying the colors for the next class. We discussed patters and lines that we could make to fill the paper without painting any one picture or letters or words. I had some large aprons that I used for middle and high schoolers. They swallowed my students. It was cute and got the job done.

Then students worked in collaborative teams to create their paintings on sheets of bulliten board paper (roughly sized large enough to cover the table) that I helped myself to from the teacher's lounge.

I had some help later cutting the paintings into "leaves" and didn't end up using all of the painted paper, but it was a great experience for the students. I also rolled out two large sheets of brown bulliten board paper and spray glued them to attach the leaves. Some were reinforced with masking tape. I used masking tape to secure the jaguars so that they could be returned later. The moon was my favorite!