Saturday, January 22, 2011

Chinese Inspiration

Chinese Calendar
Front

 Chinese Calendar
back
 I have a 4th grade student this year that moved into my school district from China.  He is just learning English and has a translator.  His translator gave me this beautiful old Chinese Calendar knowing that our next country in our series would be China! I was so excited! I am still playing around with some ideas as to how we can create our own Calendar to look similar to this one!
Of course I had to find some children's books to use as inspiration for our lessons as well! My 4th graders are just starting Eric Carle inspired dragons!
We painted paper for our dragons and used the rubber tools to make scales. The kids were so amazed you would have thought I was doing magic tricks in the art room!!

4 comments:

  1. Terrific! I'll keep watching to see what you do. I have a brand-new student from China in the 4th grade as well - she started just after Christmas break. She has an ESL teacher who meets w/her for some time daily, but no translator. She is newly adopted, and has a sister in the 3rd grade who was adopted from China as a kindergartner. But the 3rd grade sister no longer speaks much of any Chinese. I've only seen the new girl a couple of times so far. She's petite and incredibly sweet and the girls all adore her, which really helps.

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  2. If you want to create the slatted look of that calendar, perhaps you'd want to cut up strips of cereal boxes (use the back sides for the brownish color)?

    That rubber tool looks cool. Where did you get them? Is it tempera or acrylic paint? Did you have to be really fast to scratch into it before it dries? It looks so good!

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  3. Phyl,
    What a great idea using the cereal boxes! I have been thinking about what I could use to mimic that thin wood. I thought about popsicle sticks but they would be so small. I will have to experiment with the boxes. Thanks! When I told my students we were studying China they all looked at Peter(the new Chinese Student) and were all excited about it because they knew he was from there!

    The paint is tempera and yes we had to work fast! I told the students to paint half of their paper first and then scratch and then paint the other half and scratch the rest because of the drying. Or if it dried too fast they would just quickly put a new coat on and scratch away! I told them to paint their paper one solid color first and then on top mix 2 colors, so that when they scratched away the first coat would show through. The tools I ordered from either Nasco or School Supply? They were with the paint section I remember because I originally bought them for Clay tools! So now I use them for both!

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  4. Hi, I love your art around the world theme. I have been doing the same thing for the past three years as a part of a grant. It has been an amazing learning experience for both my students and myself. I just started my blog a few months ago and I am blogging our journey around the world. I got a few great ideas from your blog. Please check ours out, I'd love to know I gave somebody else some good ideas. Feel free to e-mail me if you want to share more ideas, like I said I have been doing this same approach for three years. My blog is smartypantsjohnston.blogspot.com Looking forward to hearing from you! Jessica

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