Culture Lesson!

 This lesson we taught about Mexico’s culture! The first thing we did was have students take a pretest. This was a quick matching activity about different vocabulary students would learn in the upcoming lesson! Then we began introducing our tier 3 vocabulary to the students!

The vocab words were hidden by a piece of construction paper, and each word a student was able to come up with and reveal it! More students participated this time in revealing the answer so they seem more engaged! First we went over culture and then traditions and values, which are important to every culture. The remainder of the vocabulary consisted of words specific to Mexican culture. These were two major holidays, day of the dead and Cinco de mayo. Then we talked about sugar skulls and murals. The lesson was then broken up into read alouds and then corresponding activities. The first activity we did was reading la Luna (folktale) and then creating a banner that is used to decorate Mexican traditions.

After that we learned about the day of the dead through a read aloud. Students were asked to answer the question of what is left on altars during the day of the dead. Their answers ranged from food, flowers, sugar skulls, and pictures. It was funny when some of the students were really bummed they had missed out on the Day of the Dead this year but seemed excited that it was a tradition that would happen next year! Then students decorated sugar skull masks, which are traditional food left on altars during this holiday.

After that we moved into Cinco de mayo, where students learned about it further through a read aloud. Before reading the book we asked students to pay extra attention to the bands that play during Cinco de mayo. Which were mariachi bands!

So we made guitars out of paper and yarn and decorated them similar to how the mariachi bands look! Their favorite part seemed to be adding the strings to the guitar, they were so focused!
After we learned all about the holidays and the traditions that are a part of them we had students participate in a card hunt of primary sources. Students were given a card with a tradition on it and had to find the matching pair. One set of cards was from the present and one was from the past. For example, if a student had a present image of people

celebrating the day of the dead, they wanted to find who had the past picture of the day of the dead. Then they would find similarities and differences and they shared either the class. To end the lesson we wanted to have the students make a mural! They would write their name big in the center of the paper then add pieces of their culture and hobbies around the page. We were going to tape them all together but ran out of time. We told them they would be able to finish it next time! Then we gave the post test and that was the end of our lesson!