SECRET SANTA

Christmas are here!!!! and Students from SIES Humanes in Cubas have organized their special Secret Santa or "El Amigo Invisible" as we know it. 

Every student has to make a gift for another classmate randomly chosen. There are two conditions: the first one, the gift has to fit inside a ballon and the second one, they have only fifty minutes to make it . After putting the gift inside the ballon they have to tie it, decorate it and write the name of their secret friend outside. With all the ballons we have designed a beautiful Christmas tree.

They will have to wait until the last day before Christmas holidays to prick the ballons and find their special gifts!!! 

EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPHICS

HIEROS = HOLY 

GLYPHE = WRITING 

HIEROGLYPH = HOLY WRITING

The Ancient Egyptians began to develop writing system over 5.000 years ago, around 3000 BCE. They used pictures of objects, people or animals to write down their language. There are over 700 hieroglypics signs to represent different objects, actions, sounds or ideas.

One of the keys to unlocking the secrets of Ancient Egyptian writing was the 'Rosetta Stone'. The Rosetta Stone is a stone with writing on it. It was created in 196 BC, but it wasn´t found until 1799. The text is made up of three translations of a single passage, written in two Egyptian language scripts (Hieroglyphic and Demotic), and in classical Greek. Many people worked on deciphering hieroglyphs over several hundred years. However, the structure of the script was very difficult to work out. After many years of studying the Rosetta Stone and other examples of ancient Egyptian writing, Jean-François Champollion deciphered hieroglyphs in 1822. Champollion could read both Greek and demotic. He was able to figure out what the seven demotic signs were. By looking at how these signs were used in demotic he was able to work out what they stood for. Then he began tracing these demotic signs back to hieroglyphic signs. By working out what some hieroglyphs stood for, he could make educated guesses about what the other hieroglyphs stood for.
The Rosetta Stone has been exhibited in the British Museum since 1802. Nowadays it is the most visited piece all over the museum.

AFRICAN MASKS

Ritual and ceremonial masks are an essential feature of the traditional culture and art of the peoples of Su-Saharan Africa. They were used in religious and social events to represent the spirits of ancestors or to control the good and evil forces in the community. They come to life, possessed by their spirit in the performance of the dance, and are enhanced by both the music and atmosphere of the occasion. Some combine human and animal features to unite man with his natural environment. This bond with nature is of great importance to the African and through the ages masks have always been used to express this relationship.

Masks are one of the elements of great African art that have most evidently influenced European and Western art in general; in the 20th century, artistic movements such as cubism, fauvism and expressionim have often taken inspiration from the vast and diverse heritage of African masks.

In most cases, mask-making is an art that is passed on from father to son, along with the knowledge of the symbolic meanings conveyed by such masks. At this point, this art has been passed on to Students from SIES Humanes in Cubas who have become mask-maker achieving impressive results that you a can observe below.