Sugar Skulls and teaching moments

School year classes started at Kudzu in the beginning of October, not that you would know it from the lack of posting on my part.  It was due to a calamity of errors on my part that needed fixing by my better half, husband, who was in Hong Kong the past three weeks for work.

Which seemed to mostly consist of sending my pictures of the protest two blocks from his hotel to turn my head grey, but that's another story.

The Wednesday class began with creating Sugar Skulls out of clay.  I brought out a couple of skulls for them to look at for reference and off they went.  While they were creating their skulls, I told them a bit about the holiday that takes place in Mexico and what a wonderful way it is to remember loved ones who have passed away. 

When they were finished, I pulled out sharpie pens, acrylic paints and glitter glue for them to use to decorate their work.  As time ran out, I had pulled out some crepe paper for them to make flowers to glue on also and promised the girls we put the flowers on at next week's class.

Here is how a couple of skulls looked at the end of class that day.

Although it is a little hard to tell in the above skull, both of these students chose to use glitter glue in the eye sockets.  I thought it looked quite marvelous.

Unfortunately when I came back to the studio the next afternoon to teach, gravity had played a part in their creations and the glue that was once in the sockets, now ran down the face.

7 year old

Unexpected, yes!  Ruined, no!  At least not as far as I was concerned, I thought it turned out quite interesting and I knew this particular student would more than likely LOVE the results.

And when she arrived at class that next week, her response was just as I expected - a huge grin and a exclamation of "cool!"

7 year old

I was not quite as confident in regards to the other little girls' response and she was definitely unsure at first.  I think it helped that her friend was so enthusiastic about the changes, but for her, the skull was suppose to be happy...not sad.   So we talked about all the times people cry "happy tears", which then seemed to make everything OK.  

From my perspective, she wasn't so much as upset that the glue had ran but wrestling with how that interpreted into what she was wanting to convey in her sculpture.  Once she realized that people do in fact sometimes cry when they are extremely happy, she had no problems with gravity getting involved in the fun.

8 year old

Their other friend who also used the glitter glue a little less enthusiastically had no problems with gravity and so we took a minute to talk about why the glue ran on some and not others.  Without help, they all surmised  the glue had been applied to thickly. 

And so through the process, they learned.  I'm sure they will come back to this moment in the future when applying paint, glue, or other materials and remember the time when they applied things to thickly and they ran down the work over time. I believe even the student who did not have issues with running glue will also file the results away to utilize at a later date.

Most importantly, they learned to embrace the unexpected.  One of those great life lessons we all need when navigating through this world because as all adults know, you have a plan and then sometimes life has another plan. 

A lesson these students passed with flying colors while creating their sugar skulls.