Mayan Temple / Pyramid Craft

This week, we are studying the Mayan Culture in our Mayan Mysteries camp. So far, it has been a blast! On day one of the camp, we focused on the religion of the Mayas. We learned a lot of new vocabulary in Spanish and a TPR motion to represent each one: gods, rain, sun, corn, hurricane, los mayas.  We pondered the disappearance of the Mayas and speculated on what happened to them. They learned to pick out Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, and Belize on the map as well.  During outside time, we had rain races and rain games. So much fun!

Today, we focused on Architecture. At about 11:00 pm last night, I became inspired by something I found online and ended up with this! The vocabulary focus was templo, pirámide, ruinas, sol, y piedras.  Today, it went over really well with the students. We focused on shapes: circle, square, and rectangle as each child described his/her temple. We reinforced counting and "yo tengo" as each child counted his/her 'piedras' and told the class, "yo tengo______piedras en mi templo."

The craft was super easy. I'll save you some time and tell you it works better if you have a bowl with some glue and paint it on the paper (we used donated wine corks for paintbrushes, thanks to our generous moms!), rather than on the back of the chex cereal. Here is the picture of the finished product. It was pretty wet when I shot this, but it dried up nicely (after I took the picture, lol).

Materials:

Chex cereal or Cinnamon Toast Crunch

Colored paper 

Glue

One piece of cardboard

The paper got rather heavy with so much glue, so I sprayed some spray glue on the back and stuck to a piece of cardboard to give it some strength.

Here is the finished project!