I felt honored when my principal this year asked me to teach an art project about Mexico. I’m fascinated with Sugar Skulls, and I was so happy I got to revisit one of my favorite art projects.

I asked my 4th grade classes (each class is made up of at least half Hispanic students) if anyone had heard of or seen a sugar skull. I called on students who raised their hands and we shared out.

We watched a video about the history of sugar skulls, and as a class, we compared and contrasted artists’ sugar skull designs on the SmartBoard.

After spending time comparing and contrasting sugar skull designs, we discovered that certain designs that came up time after time. We noticed that we saw roses, spiderwebs, hearts, flowers, diamonds, stars, musical instruments, spiral lines, leaves, flowering vines, and different types of lines repeated over and over.

I created a handout that had a reminder of some of the most commonly seen sugar skull designs. On my handout, I stressed that I also wanted the students to come up with their own designs too.

The sugar skull art project requirements were:

– a big skull in the middle of their paper

– a border

– drawing using any combination of commonly-used sugar skull designs or the artists’ own design creations to add personality to both the skull and their borders

– using at least 3 different line types (wavy, straight, zigzag, broken, dotted, spiral, combo, or their own line design)

I was blown away with the amazing drawings my students came up with. Wow!!! 😍😍😍

The black and white pencil line drawings were so incredible that, as much as I love color, I hesitated to add color as I had planned to. I decided to let them go for it and I’m so glad. I’ll post the painted sugar skulls after this.