Wednesday, August 26, 2015

India's Diwali Rangoli


Okay, I know, That's a mouthful! As if Indian culture isn't beautiful enough with the gorgeous color and design, they also have a festival that is the "Festival of Lights." A festival devoted to "pushing the darkness out of our lives and embracing the light..." Well, that's something I can buy into.

During Diwali, designs called Rangoli are drawn on the floor of homes. This radially symmetrical design can be made with sawdust, flower petals or chalk and usually has oil lamps surrounding it.


To begin our rangoli, we fold our paper into quadrants (ding, ding, math word!) and draw a circle in the center where the lines intersect (ding ding, math word!). We then add different shapes that are radially symmetrical (ding, ding... again?)

After our drawing is complete we use a black sharpie to outline. I started using chalk and quickly realized it would smear too easily.....



Construction paper crayons or fluorescent chalk finishes the Rangoli.


Just because we enjoyed the printmaking in K and 1 so much, we stamped a background paper, and cut out our Rangoli and mounted it on the stamped paper.


Fabulous.






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