Kachina Masks craft

Hi! Future Ticia 2024 here, and I’m updating our Kachina Masks craft post because blogging practices have changed since I wrote this, and it’s helpful to update this, and put some more useful stuff in, so I’m adding in a few things, updating pictures and what have you. This was a fun geography lesson as we learned more about the Zuni people as part of our New Mexico Unit which is part of the giant United States Geography. I now return you to past Ticia 2010.

(there are affiliate links in here)

Zuni tribe

We read all about the Zuni who lived primarily in New Mexico, we started off talking about visiting there, and what we remembered, and then read the book. Afterwards we decided to make Kachina masks, so we could be kachina dancers.

Future Ticia 2024 kind of surprised I didn’t say a thing about my Grandma and how she had kachina dolls in her house growing up and how that was what got me low-key obsessed with them and so as a kid, I was always curious about kachina dolls and kachina masks, and wanted to know more about them, but couldn’t find much about them in the days of pre-internet. Thankfully we do now have more we can find. I’m super thankful for the internet and the ability to travel more.

Zuni booklist

Future Ticia 2024 here, back when I first wrote this, I would write a weekly “here’s what we read for the week post,” and it would be a huge mish-mash of all sorts of books, but it wasn’t so helpful for people looking for books on a certain topic, so now I’m going back to posts like this and adding in more books. At the time I had one specific book I used, which I primarily used for some amount of information because it was a third-grade book, but let me give you a few more books to give you a more rounded idea.

• Zuni– it looks like this might be out of print, so I’m going to link to some similar books on Amazon that look promising, but I’ll make a note that I haven’t read them
• Two Zuni Artists– the same artist and an even older publishing date, but it looks to be still in print, it intrigues me because he’s tracing the traditional art and a modern artist using the traditional art style

Oh, now I’m seeing why I only had the one book, I had practically nothing in my library on the Zuni and even Amazon does not have much I would recommend.

When I look for stuff on Kachina it gets more… ummm… sketchy. So now let me move over to YouTube.

YouTube videos on Zuni and Kachina

Okay, I’m looking this up to see what I can find because I know that I am just someone who like to learn about stuff and wants my kids to learn stuff, and wants to try and let my kids explore things, but don’t actually have all of the deep background of all of this.

This is a very brief and that’s the first result when I did a search of “Zuni Tribe for kids,” which was very disappointing because it was pretty much not anything related to the Zuni. It was almost exclusively other tribes or very generic information about the Southwestern tribes, so I tried my search making it more generically about the Zuni.

I would use these next videos if you have older kids, as in 3rd grade or older, I don’t think anyone younger would do well sitting still for these videos.

Like I said that one is pretty dry, but this next one is a little better.

 Okay, finding good videos on Kachina masks is tricky because there is a lot of controvery about them currently:

1. There has been controversial sales of antique kachinas in particular by a market in Paris.
2. How to tell the difference between “real” and “fake” kachinas.
3. Videos explaining what kachinas mean. Then the next video will be explaining why the last video is totally wrong.
4. Ummm, and then there’s the whole “here’s how to wear a mask because of Covid” videos, deep sigh.

Because of that I am only going to include the video from the National Parks Service in here, and then if I can find one from one of the tribes (Hopi, Zuni, or Navajo) talking about the kachina that is under 20 minutes I’ll include that.

I was not able to find a video I was willing to trust other than the one from the National Park service. There may have been one, but I’d already scrolled past over 20 videos on how to help children wear masks, should wildlife wear masks, why we need to wear masks, and about a million other variations on that. I didn’t want to waste more time

Kachina Masks craft supplies

paper plates, dot markers, glitter glue (actually this is one of those fun crafts that is only limited by your time and your imagination, our time was not enough to add all the bells and whistles)

How to make Kachina Masks

Future Ticia 2024, I’m going to admit right now this is not at all how these are traditionally made. Traditionally there are reasons and symbols behind what is put on the masks. However, my kids enjoyed attempting to make masks that looked similar to Kachina masks.

This was a chance for them to experiment and try out different techniques and get messy and not be afraid of the mess they were making.

1.  Saturate your plate in dot paint.  Then add about a pound of glitter glue.  Make sure to add so much that you have a pile of it in one spot that is probably equivalent to a cup of glue.  This really makes it sparkle.

2.  Stick your whole hand on the wet glitter glue.  Then act surprised that it got dirty.

 Finished products (or the ones I could find).

Come check out some more geography ideas

• Wisconsin Unit
• How to host a geography fair
• desert biome lesson and craft
• Gabon Unit
• How to use picture books to teach maps