Dia de Los Muertos Lesson

I am involved in OLAS, which is a club on campus that hosts Latin American events. For OLAS, we were making sugar skulls for students on campus to decorate for Dia de Los Muertos. From this idea, I knew that I wanted to teach  a lesson on Dia de Los Muertos and have the kids decorate sugar skulls. 

For those of you who do not know much about Dia de Los Muertos, it literally translates as Day of the Dead. It originated from Mexico and has been celebrated for thousands of years. The sugar skulls are used as decoration and help celebrate the liveliness of the dead in which this culture believes. The lives of people are celebrated rather than the deaths being mourned.  

I told the idea of decorating sugar skulls to Kendra, who is also teaching at this school but with different students. We decided we wanted to do this, but we needed to figure out in terms of our budget what we could buy and create for these students. We already had Scultamound which is basically a plaster that is used for art. We borrowed the skull molds from OLAS and used the plaster mixture to make our first four skulls. The plaster, however, was not cooperating with us when we tried to take out the semi-hardened material. Some of the skulls fell apart, but we managed to get them all on a tray to put in the oven. At this point, it was late in the night. Thankfully, Kendra stayed up to grab the skulls out of the oven. This whole process took us about 4 hours. I knew that we could not continue this process for the rest of the 16 skulls we needed to make. 

I contacted our boss about buying supplies for the actual sugar skulls. Every recipe calls for meringue powder, which is hard to come by. Luckily, we found this website which has a recipe for sugar skulls without meringue powder!
http://benstarr.com/blog/how-to-make-calaveras-or-mexican-sugar-skulls/

After two trips to the store, fixing a broken car, and a lot of Cities 97 music, we finished the 20 sugar skulls within about the same time it took us to make the 4 plaster skulls. 

We were realizing that in real life, this is something we need to work on: not spending so much time on ONE LESSON. We only had the students for half an hour for this project. With success, the students enjoyed decorating the sugar skulls and making it individual. We had some issues with the orange frosting bag exploding, but my nice dress pants and black shoes took the hit. I had a student say thank you to me at the end of the lesson, which was great and made me feel thankful I was able to complete the sugar skulls!