Gumbo Island

Activity 1:

In Search Of... Gumbo Island

Objective:

Students will explore their conceptions of the culture and resources of Louisiana and produce a montage/collage of Louisiana.

Materials:

Motivational Link:

Explain to the students that they will be viewing a video series called "Gumbo Island." Tell them it will take them to places in Louisiana they might not have ever seen before. Tell them Louisiana can be compared to a gumbo. The ingredients to make this gumbo are the people, places, culture and history of our state.

Learning Activity:

  1. Ask students to list special things about Louisiana's culture or resources. Examples will include: food, jazz music, Mardi Gras, crawfish, hunting, alligators, Mississipi River, etc. Make a list of these on the board as students call them out.

  2. Tell students that they will spend the next few days collecting reminders of Louisiana and putting together a montage/collage of the items collected. Ask students to bring in one item that represents "Louisiana" to them (rice, Tabasco sauce, alligator picture, State Capitol picture, etc.).

  3. As students bring in the items, glue them to the poster board or poster paper. This will probably become a 3-dimensional project. If you are artistic or can enlarge the Gumbo Island logo, you may want to use this as the basis for the collection. If not, be sure to include a facsimile of the Gumbo Island logo in your collage.

  4. Encourage students to look through magazines to find pictures of things relating to Louisiana. Add them to the montage/collage.

  5. Display the montage/collage throughout the "State of Art" emphasis. You may want to include it in the "Gumbo Island Museum of Art."

Alternate Activity:

  1. Provide a cardboard template of the state. Have each child trace it onto poster board and cut out.

  2. Let each child take the poster board template home to decorate as he/she thinks best represents the state.

  3. Display the states on a bulletin board, and save for the final activity, "Gumbo Island Museum of Art."

Extension:

Let students decorate or color the Gumbo Island Adventure Journal cover and begin a journal to keep throughout the activities of this Resource Guide. As the first entry have them list things that make Louisiana unique, based on what they learned from this activity.

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