Kente Colors

This is the second year that I have done this project for Black History Month.  In the past, I have used an African American Heritage video to showcase African American traditions, customs, history, art, and music.  However, the library did not have the video this year, so I used Google images and pulled-up some images of Kente Cloth and discussed the history and color significance with the students before starting the lesson.  Since I have Kg., 1st, and 2nd grades back-to-back, I did the same lesson with all three classes.   It is a great lesson for sorting and stacking strips of paper by size - something that can easily be tied into math.  After the students made the overlapping strips of paper, we used Sharpie markers to add traditional African line patterns to our "kente cloth".

 An example from Google Images showing "real" Kente

 

Meanings of the Kente colors

Our paper version of Kente cloth