Book choices for today:

C is for China   Sung Wan So
Daisy Come Home   Jan Brett
China A-Z   Justine Fontes
My First Book of Chinese Calligraphy   Guillaume Olive
The Pet Dragon   Christoph Niemann

Geography: (first circle)

Need for lesson – Pictures of Chinese Art including calligraphy examples and a calligraphy set if available.

Geography 35
We have talked about the country of China. China is found on which continent? China is known for many beautiful forms of art – silk painting, pottery, paper cutting, kite making, and calligraphy. Calligraphy is an ancient art of writing that is beautiful. Calligraphy means ‘good writing’. There are seven standard brush strokes seen in calligraphy. Some are a horizontal line, vertical line, dot, sweeping downward stroke, and a sharp curve.
One who is going to do calligraphy would need paper, Chinese ink, an ink stone, special brushes, and a brush rest. The artist takes his ink stone and adds water to it. They then will take the ink stick and grind the ink stick against the stone. This makes ink that can be brushed onto paper. The brushes are made from animal hair that is bundled together and put onto bamboo reeds to make a brush, its like a paint brush. The brushes have to be taken care of very carefully.
When writing in Chinese, you must always keep the brush straight up and down. Do not let your palm touch the brush. It is important to know how to hold the brush to become good at calligraphy, and it takes a lot of practice.
Chinese words are made up of characters. When you combine two or more characters you create a new meaning. The meaning can also change if you make more than one of the same character. If you draw one character for the word tree, it just means a tree. Drawing two tree characters means the woods, and three tree characters can mean a forest or jungle. Let’s look at some examples of Chinese art and calligraphy.

Chinese Art

Calligraphy Set

Additional Works:

Chinese Numbers 1-10 – I made these into a matching work. Children can also make a booklet of the numbers by copying the characters.

Matching Characters

Chinese Number Matching

Chinese Character Matching

Art:

Chinese Character Hanging – These look very nice if you use black or red ribbon to hang them with. (idea from kidssoup.com)

Chinese Lanterns – Have pre-folded and line marked construction paper for children to make into lanterns.

Chinese Art

Art

Chinese Lantern Art

Zoology:(second circle)

Need for lesson – A hoola-hoop masking tape spider web (you need to make this) with a bowl of cotton balls. Have a review of spiders and webs. Children can sit and gently toss cotton balls at the spider web. Those that stick are like the insects that get stuck on spider webs.

Spider Web