Meath Spirals

I really wanted to spread out from the same old "Cave Art" for my Prehistoric Art unit. I love cave art, but I didn't want every project to look the same. So I found amazing artworks and learned a lot in researching what other things were created in "Prehistoric Times". 

The Meath Spirals are stone carvings found in Meath County, Ireland from around 3200 BCE. They have a variety of designs so it was easy for my 4th graders to create some really unique works. 

We started by creating a glue and yarn collage of a spiral on cardboard. I gave them a handout of Celtic spirals for inspiration, but they could deviate on these as they pleased.

Then we wrapped the designs with copper tooling foil and burnished them until the designs came through. We stamped a square of paper with some Celtic knot stamps that I luckily had, and glued the metal to the background.

ALL of these were beautiful, no matter what the skill level or the amount of work we put into them with the time we had. They were really nervous about this because it is a lot of "hard" work, But in the end they were happy with their results. 

You can find the PPT I created for this here. 

I borrowed a lot of the technique here from a lesson I did with my Frist camp kids this past summer. You can see what they did here.