Kids can make a pinata to celebrate the Spanish festival of Posadas.
Posadas (Pasadas) is celebrated from December 16th to 24th in Spanish and Mexican communities. The feast – which ends each evening with a pinata filled with treats for the children – celebrates the journey of Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem.You can make your own mini pinata using paper cone cups, a few extras like paint and paper and treats.
What You Need:
- Paper cone cups (pointed bottoms — like the ones used for water dispensers).
- Gold, silver and brightly colored paints.
- Pipe cleaners.
- Crepe or tissue paper.
- Glue (or needle and thread – for older students)
- Paintbrushes.
- Goodies to put inside. (you could also leave the pinata empty and pretend).
What You Do:
- You need two cups for each pinata.
- Insert the ends of a pipe cleaner through the pointed end of one of the cups.
- Spread the ends of the pipe cleaner inside the cup and leave enough on the outside. This will be the hanger.
- If you decide to put treats inside the pinata, do this now. Make sure you don’t use any food that can spoil because once the pinata is complete, you probably won’t want to break it open. In fact, why not just use popcorn kernels or dry split peas instead of candy?
- Place the rims of the cups together. Younger children can glue the cups together, while older children can sew the cups together using needle and thread.
- Decorate the pinata. This could be done in several ways:
- You could spray paint the pinata gold or silver and then draw pictures with markers on top of the painted pinata.
- You could glue tissue or crepe paper on the pinata to give it texture.
- You could decorate using just magic markers.
- You could paint the pinata with tempera or watercolor or acrylic paint.
- You could glue glitter and buttons on the pinata.
- Basically the idea here is to use your imagination and go a little wild. Maybe you could look at some books showing examples of pinatas to give you ideas.
- Have fun decorating!
