Día de los Muertos Resources

With Fall Break coming up next week (hooray!) and homecoming week right after, I’m hitting Día de los Muertos early this year (also, invariably I see everyone’s wonderful Día de los Muertos lessons AFTER it’s already passed, so here ya go, folks – plenty of time to plan for your lessons!). Here’s what I’m doing:

Warm Up:

Comparing and contrasting products and practices of Halloween and Dia de los Muertos. No more, “Isn’t that Mexican Halloween?”

We brainstormed products and practices of Halloween, and wrote them on butcher-paper posters. I then put on some of the videos below, and asked them to look for the products and practices of Día de los Muertos.  Gracias Laura Sexton for the idea to approach it from the Products/Practices/Perspectives angle. 🙂

Videos

The Wild Thornberrys celebrateDía de los Muertos:

Travel Channel:

Catrina Make Up Tutorial:

I downloaded all the videos as FLVs with KeepVid and played them back to back with VLC media player – by downloading them I avoid internet connectivity issues and ensure that I’ll still have the videos if they’re later removed from Youtube. The Wild Thornberrys were actually pretty accurate, and held my students’ attention. The travel channel video is GREAT and short (though not quite as engaging as the Thornberrys), so if you’re on a tight schedule, go with that one. They also enjoyed the make up tutorial, and I showed them this picture of me from Halloween last year.

If you want to keep it all in the TL, you could movie talk this clip:

After the videos, we added the products and practices of Día de los Muertos to our poster. It’s a little messy, but here’s the result:

I’m going to follow up tomorrow with some reflection questions, or possibly class discussion on the perspectives reflected in each culture’s holiday products and practices.

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