The Cave Painters

Hello!

My class of grade 02 were fascinated to learn about the lives of early humans. In every class they flaunted their research skill by sharing something new they found out about them. Well, this topic excites me too so I grab every chance to try out new things with my class. 😄

While learning about the lives of early humans, we looked at a few cave paintings and tried reading them to gather more information about the cave people. It was interesting to see the young ones use their imagination and share their understanding of the paintings. Some of the points that they reflected upon were: types of animals that the humans hunted, types of tools and weapons they used, fire used not just for cooking meat but also scare away wild animals and many more such facts about early humans' everyday life. 

I thought it to be a good idea to have my students make their own cave paintings followed by a peer interaction on what they can gather by looking at each other's work. 

The materials needed for the activity are very easily available and it can be conducted online as well. You will require:

1. a white A4 sheet

2. brown paint

3. pencil

4. cotton

I began the activity by showing a few more samples of cave paintings to my students. This helped them know more about the cave people. They took ideas from the samples and created their own drawings. Once they completed drawing, they diluted the brown paint and used some cotton to dab over the entire sheet making sure not to leave any white spaces. Then using a paint brush, they painted their drawings and kept it for drying. Once it dried, they outlined their drawing again using a pencil. Some of them even used a pen. Finally, we crushed the paper giving it a shape of a ball and opened it to what looked like a cave painting. 

Below are some of their work.

It was not just fun to make these but the peer interaction after the activity helped us reflect on our learning about the lives of early humans and appreciate each other's efforts.