Wednesday, September 14, 2016

Mayan Book - Grolier Codex - Activity Page


Free drawing coloring page for the Mayan Civilization.  I'm using this as part of my lesson plan to go in Chase's Social Studies interactive notebook.

Recently, PBS published an article finding that the "Grolier Codex", originally thought to be a forgery, was in fact, a true artifact, depicting deities that were unknown at the time of its discovery and therefore could not be faked.

It has several images linked from a gallery of the pages.  For my unit, I am having Chase study the images, watch some videos on Mayan culture and read the article about the "Grolier Codex".  Also, there was an interesting tidbit about the Quetzal bird, a very long feathered and beautiful bird, that was seen as a messenger to their bird deity, Quetzalcoatl.  They used the feathers of the male bird for their headdresses and ceremonial adornments.

For this activity/coloring page, I have adorned the borders with Mayan styled drawing, using the apparent number code from the codex as the side borders.  The Mayan culture revolved around the stars and the dates, so those would be recurrent themes as well.  The sheet is 8.5" x 11" but can be shrunken down for interactive notebooks.  I set mine to print as 8" x 10" and deselected "fit to page" in the Windows print options.  Your printer may need adjusting, run a test print.

This could be used for guided drawing.  Tell them to draw a one sided figure, like in my drawing and to exaggerate the nose.  Tell them to draw an animal on top of their head with big eyes, like a funny hat or headdress.  Then they can choose what the character is doing.  Holding corn or a snake by the tail, or holding a spear.  Then, they can decorate the empty spaces with patterns from lines and dots in elliptical shapes, kind of like a rounded rectangle.

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