The Hindu Pantheon - Image identification

Religion: Hinduism

Purpose: to teach and reinforce familiarity with major Hindu deities

Cognitive Skills: knowledge

Learning Styles: active, sensing, visual

Intelligences: visual-spatial

Use: in classroom (can also be used at home as flashcards for review if students have or make their own set using the Hindu pantheon Webquest activity)

For: individuals, pairs, small groups, entire class

Estimated time: 5 - 10 minutes

Materials needed: Posters or flashcards of Hindu deity images (teacher can get these through online resources, at an Indian or museum gift shop, or local Hindu temple)

The Activity:

• After teacher introduces Hindu deities, stressing symbols associated with each deity, students can be asked to test their familiarity with the images by trying to correctly ID examples. This can be done in several ways:

• Individually: Posters can be displayed around the room, each labeled with a number. Students can be given a worksheet with a list of deity names and freely wander around the room, reviewing each poster, writing the number of the poster by the deity name they think it represents.

• Cooperatively: If there are several sets of images, students can work in pairs or small groups, to see how many images they can identify. Then they can check the work of another group and come back to make corrections to their own identifications. 

• Students can write the names of the deities on slips of paper and attempt to place the names on the correct images

• Competitively: since students sometimes enjoy a competitive game, the identification can be done in a format similar to a spelling bee: each student gets a turn to correctly ID a selected image, going from one team to the other until someone gets it right, eliminating those who get it wrong. (note: this process, unlike the others, does not allow each student to explore all the images)

• Closure: teacher will review student results and remind students of symbols to look for to help them identify the various deities. Pay special attention to those deities that were most difficult for students to ID

• Teacher may suggest students follow-up at home with the Hindu pantheon Webquest activity

Web resource: images of Hindu deities are available at many different Websites. Here is one extensive collection:

• Lakshmi International

Alternative possibilities: An art class can do this with images of famous paintings or statues. A music class can do this with images of instruments or notes. A world cultures class can do this with images of flags from different countries, silhouette outlines of countries, or try to match capitals with different countries. Similarly, this can be done for US states (state flags, birds, trees, silhouette outlines, state capitals). A history class can be asked to identify US presidents, etc...