Face-to-face with feelings - mask-making activities for teaching language, literature and self-expression - includes related article

A mask-making project that connect kids with language, literature, and self-expression

The ancient art of mask-making takes on new meaning when teacher Jean Kalick Molot and photographer Andrew Levine team up. Recently the two presented a day of discussion, mask-making, and writing that engaged Jean's fourth-grade students so much, they almost forgot about recess.

Turn the page for a look at how Jean, who teaches at P.S. 158 in New York City, uses the mask project to reinforce reading, writing, and interpersonal skills and how you can do the same with your students.

1. Linking to Literacy

Jean begins by reading aloud a book about emotions (a great pick: C Is for Curious by Woodleigh Hubbard, Chronicle Books). Next, she asks students to make a list in their journals of all the emotions they can think of. After a few minutes, students share their lists. "Scared! Jealous! Happy! Ecstatic" they call out, as Jean writes the adjectives on the board. To flex her students' grammar skills, she asks for the noun form of the adjectives they each offer.

Then Jean asks, What's the difference between happy and ecstatic? How about angry and furious? By distinguishing between similar emotions, Jean's aim is to stretch students' vocabulary and to make them more insightful readers. "When kids are able to name and express a whole range of emotions, it helps them understand more complex books," Jean explains. "By fourth grade, kids are reading novels in which characters' motivations are understated. Kids have to understand how emotions drive characters to act in certain ways."

2. From Personal Perspectives

After the class has made an extended list of emotions, Jean asks students to imagine a time when they might experience these emotions. "You might be depressed when your father gets laid off," one child offers. "Or when someone you love dies," says another. "You'd feel shy when you go with your mom and dad to a party and you don't know anyone." Clearly, these are situations the children have experienced; Jean responds sensitively to each student's comment. (Jean tells me later that one of her main goals as a teacher is to make students feel accepted and unafraid to ask questions and take risks; throughout the year, she guides students to support one another's comments.)

3. The Faces of Feelings

Now Jean introduces her students to photographer Andrew Levine, who has presented mask-making projects in several elementary classrooms. Andrew talks with children about how facial expressions often communicate a person's feelings. "My job as a photographer is to capture what a person is feeling," Andrew says.

Andrew shows students several photographs from The Best of Life and invites kids to name the emotion each photograph conveys. "Show me what the feeling looks like with your face and your posture," Andrew suggests.

Next, Andrew shares photos of African masks. "Notice how the mask-makers reveal emotions through lines, color, and the shape of the eyes, the nose, and the mouth," he says. "Keep these techniques in mind when you make your masks." Then he asks: Why do people wear masks? To celebrate Halloween; to scare enemies away; to be something they can't be; and to express something, are a few of the students' answers.

4. Making the Masks

The only instruction children are given is to "choose an emotion you've experienced, would like to experience, or one you've never experienced." To help children feel free to create whatever inspires them, Andrew and Jean emphasize that there is no right or wrong way of making the masks. Anything goes.

5. Unmasking Emotions Through Writing

When the masks are finished, Jean gives students 20 minutes to write about the emotions their masks express. The class has been learning about similes and metaphors recently, so Jean encourages them to write poems or journal entries that use these figures of speech.

6. Sharing Writing

When students have finished writing, they gather to "share into the circle," a technique Jean learned at Columbia University Teachers College. Children read their work one at a time, with only brief pauses in between recitings. Jean and the class refrain from commenting until everyone has read their work. "You just want to hear the language, and let it kind of wash over you," Jean says.

Here is how fourth grader Jamila Whetts, who recently emigrated to the United States from Kenya, described the feeling she conveyed with her mask:

Curious

Curious is when you look down and don't see land but you see waves

You go to another school and speak new words

You dont't walk barefoot on the sidewalks

You don't slide down waterfalls

You don't hear and see music and dancing

You don't live in buts

You go to the zoo and don't go in the cages.

WHY MASK-MAKING IS VALUABLE

"When children make masks, they can express things they can't always express through writing or speech," says Dr. Vivien Marcow Speiser, a professor of dance therapy at Lesley College Graduate School, and the director of the Creative Arts in Learning Program. "Students create a visual image, a character through which they can explore and express their feelings about a particular issue."

Is there ever a danger that a child will reveal "too much" about an issue or feeling, and thereby feel vulnerable? "Not in my opinion. Children know who it is safe to share things with," says Dr. Speiser.

MORE WRITING PROJECTS TO GO WITH MASKS

Making Metaphor: As a class, list as many kinds of landscapes, objects, and dwellings as you can think of. Ask children to use the list as a springboard to write a poem that expresses an emotion through the metaphor of objects or places. ("Sorrow is a clock/it ticks and ticks.../Sorrow is a scissor/it cuts you up inside/your heart/Sorrow is a mirror/it looks right back at you.../Sorrow is a lock/it locks you up inside yourself."--Jeanne G., a fifth grader, from the book Childmade by Cynde Gregory.)

A Life of Its Own: Ask kids to think about the emotions their masks express. If that emotion were a person, what would he or she be like? Describe the person's home, clothes, music, what he or she dreams; anything you can think of. Writing from the first-person point of view ("I am shyness. I live in a small house at the edge of the sea") helps students accept and understand the feeling as part of themselves.

The Someday Me: Ask kids to draw masks of themselves as adults, and then write about themselves as adults. Where do they live? What kind of jobs do they have?

WENDY MURRAY is an associate editor at INSTRUCTOR.

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