Said The Raven

Love this set of oil pastels.




We read a story about Ravens today in 3rd grade (in a poverty school I might add) as we started talking about Native Americans. Altho most students, minus four, of my 20 students are descendant of native peoples in North America, none seemed to know about it.
News to them.
It might not be a moment in time for you reading, but I had to pause, and say a little thought to myself in slight curse form, and plow forward into introducing them to themselves.
too bad no one thought of that before now.



That might clue you in about what is the price of poverty and our present culture of, well, I hesitate to name this kind of lack of disconnection. I'll call it getting an education that fails to tell you who you are and who anyone else is either. The high price of homogenization and the politics of ed.




So finally I said let's look at this map of the tribes that once existed in North America. Way back -yet another shocker for them, happily finding it on my whiteboard a rare occasion when I could click over to the net and it worked plus find the resource and not be blocked.
This map is great for United States tribes. And this was a massive resource.






Well you get the idea. Interestingly they wanted to talk about the idea of tribes in Mexico.



You might need to know that my 3rd grade are mostly first and 2nd generation immigrants from Mexico, altho we have an Egyptian native and, actually a rather interesting classroom with a student whose family comes from the Philippines as well. So today we took a look at something massive to take on in a day for an 8 year old. Heritage. Our current reader story is called Dancing Rainbows and it is a story for Pueblo Indians.
So we talked about the life we saw in that non-fiction story of a life that seemed so distant.




I started to sort out some things that we can tune into about these first Americans. The connection they have to nature, first. This they found of interest. My students live in cement. I know things are pretty serious, no one has ever seen a forest. All would like too. And just a few miles up the road they CAN see redwoods. But can I get them to the trail in Santa Barbara? Would anyone ever care enough to sponsor their bus ride? The reality is, it's doubtful.
But I can hope.
I think they can do some research on different tribal customs and learn about their own culture as well. We can start there.



Anyway I had a story to read about Ravens too today. I actually wanted to talk about Crows.
I recently saw a program on the intelligence of crows. What I connected to was the myth that I recalled from Northwest Coast Pacific Indians and the Raven.
So we read a story about this trickster taking the sun to give to the people. A story that they always are fascinated by when I read it yearly at this time. I think the part where the crow transforms into a pine needle and is swallowed by the Princess to be re-born as her child always gets them.
That's the kind of stuff children want to hear about.
How's that again?



So then they made their version looking at an illustration from the story as we discussed some technical art related things-"stylization," oil pastels, media, borders, composition, side and frontal view, the way to portray eyes. And I loved that we started with contour drawings done in marker- that by the end were totally hidden-so no one ever sees this early drawing. There was a lot of moaning about those designs. They don't care for not being able to erase. And with a marker they had to go with it the first time around. And did beautiful work. I love the smeary wonderful quality of oil pastels-this was the first time they ever used them.
It was hilarious to watch them fuss over "the mess" of it all.



YES, Lovely work resulted. Now we'll write a short three paragraph report on crows or ravens together, and follow it with a myth story in the style of these fantastic native story tellers.






And try some realistic crow drawings.

And just for my own pleasure as I liked this one...
Counting Crows as friends....don't always look for dots and lines here, float a bit..



See my Mrs. Puglisi's 100 National Standards