I’m gearing up for leading WordSparks Creative Writing Camp next week, so I’m getting my kids busy trying out a few of the projects I’ve planned. The first one we tried out is the Green Man (or Woman) Mask.

Basically, the Green Man is a leafy-faced dude who has appeared in art and architecture since ancient times. He looks like this:

(Green Man photos courtesy of Wikimedai Commons. First image by Johannes Otto Först, second and third by Simon Garbutt.)

The idea for the craft is to gather natural materials from the gardens and park surrounding the museum to use in a Green Man or Green Woman mask. Then we’ll write a mask poem… or mask story for the prose inclined.

As I got my kids to  make some prototypes, here are a few things I’ve learned:

1. There is no “wrong” way to do this (at least by my standards).

2. Glue-gun glue is HOT!

3. When you go outside with a big basket and start throwing in lots of leaves, flowers, twigs, grass, etc., and them come back in and dump it all on your kitchen table, you can expect to find tiny bugs on and around your kitchen table for quite a while.

3. My baby makes a super cute Green Man.