Mayan Presentation 2020

On Friday, October 27, the 5th grade shared with parents their work on the Mayan civilization.  The Mayans were the largest organized ancient American civilization in the Americas, and when at their height, they discovered and utilized a significant number of engineering ideas to make huge beautiful city states housing giant pyramids that reached toward the sky.  At the same time, their ideas about the gods drove them always toward more and more aggressive actions against their neighbors and even themselves.  In this unit, we not only researched a number of impressive Mayan achievements in art, science, math and writing, but we also compared  their religious ideas and their bloody sacrifices to our own Catholic faith in which we realized that God Himself took on the weight of our sins, suffered death, and in the letting of His blood, saved us all.  It is interesting to note that when the Spanish had conquered Mexico and built beautiful churches, one day a group of Mayans came to the  church with a gold container.  They gave it to the priest saying, "This is where the hearts  of the Mayans were kept when they had been sacrificed to honor the debt to the gods  Now we understand that God Himself gave his own life to pay the debt of sin, therefore we want to give this vessel to the church to hold the body of God!"

In this cross curricular unit, students first researched Mayan accomplishments, using the internet,  articles and documentary clips,   They then wrote drafts for each subject area, which were corrected and they wrote final copies.  Students assembled these individual essays into a report.   While they were working on their writing, they also studied Mayan art and drew designs for masks which they made out of tinfoil and paper maiche.  The children finished by painting their designs onto their masks  For the engineering portion of the curricular piece, students partnered up to make 3-D structures of specific temple sites.  These turned out to be incredible!  Students put together these pieces on posters, which they designed according to Mayan geometric patterns and glyphs.  Back to the artistic piece.  Students learned a song in Spanish and practiced the Mexican hat dance.  They also acted out 3 Mayan folk tales.   The last piece of this project was to put the information for their subject area and building structure on index cards and practice their presentations.  Our presentation included making and eating tomales!  All in all it was an intense and fun work together!  Congratulations to the 5th grade for their hard work and magnificent presentations!