Learning from the Maya About Diversity, Culture and Ecology~Teacher’s and Parent’s Guide
with Maya Arts and Crafts of Guatemala/Artes y Artesanías Mayas de Guatemala Coloring Book

Introductory Notes to Teachers and Parents

Teaching to increase children’s capacity to appreciate the diversity of the peoples of the world!

Thanks to students in Rochester, NY schools who inspired these lessons.

All lessons designed for use with grades 2-5 or according to judgment of teacher.

The coloring book and this guide speak to the important place of arts and crafts in the lives of the Maya from thousands of years ago to the present. The lessons in this guide were developed in the belief that crafts through out the world, including Maya crafts, give us lessons about diversity, simplicity, and ecology and they can help children to form a connection not only to the Maya but to our own agricultural and preindustrial past. They can, as well, serve as a counter balance in our lives that often are overwhelmed by technologies.

This guide is intended primarily for teachers and parents who live in Canada and the U.S. The introduction in the coloring book also gives ideas about how the coloring book can be made more meaningful.

• increase empathy and respect for people of other cultures
• build consciousness about handmade traditional arts and crafts, their meaning, and importance to the Maya
• realize how the Maya teach us lessons about ecology

Although this guide concentrates on Maya arts and crafts and their meaning in our multicultural world, we hope that with your students you will investigate other dimensions of Maya culture such as their stories and fables, architecture, music, calendar system, their ancient glyph writing system and much more...

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