Cookies, Crayons, Classes, & Chaos: chinese

Showing posts with label chinese. Show all posts

Happy Moon Festival!

It's a night for celebrating with family and friends and lighting lanterns.

While not as beautiful as another part of Michigan this weekend whose art festival happened to coincide with the weekend of the moon festival, we had our own lantern celebration in the neighborhood.

A beautiful moon and street light

We followed that with the traditional eating of the moon cake!

Help Grace Lin find this dress for the Oscars!

Children's author and illustrator and Newberry honoree, Grace Lin, is looking for her dress to wear to the Newberry banquet. And since this is the equivalent to the Oscars in her world, she is looking for the perfect dress to wear.

This painted lotus cotton and silk dress from Anthropologie was her first choice, but it is sold out everywhere! Okay, well there is a size 0 version of this dress on ebay, but petite Ms. Lin says that it is too small for her.

The dress pattern seems pretty simple to me. It's the fabric and structured placement of patterns that really sells the look. http://www.satin-moon.com/ has some beautiful Asian-inspired fabric [see below] that might be able to carry off a similar look.

There is the floral pattern for the skirt the geometric pattern on the bodice and the solid black accents. But the geometric patterns here don't have the same black accents in the background like the Anthropologie dress. And these are cotton rather than cotton and silk fabrics. But it makes me hopeful that a an inspired version of this dress can be crafted.

Good luck with the dress search, Grace, and congratulations on the honor for "Where the Mountain Meets the Moon!

Chinese New Year - Lesson Plan

Scholastic has a nice set of lesson plans for studying China and incorporating that into a celebration of Chinese New Year

Chinese Unit overview

Lesson 1: So many inventions!

Book: Uses Ms. Frizzles Adventures in Imperial China by Joanna Cole.

Supplements: You can supplement this lesson with these websites describing Chinese inventions:

Chinese inventions from MiKids

Ancient Chinese Inventions

Chinese inventions from about.com

Activities: The lesson plan calls for making a compass as an example of one invention. Another option would be to make an abacus out of beads and popsicle sticks or cardboard. Though I think I might prefer the more modern version that is base 10 to the authentic version which is more like base 15 in some ways.

Lesson 2: Story of silk

Book: Uses The Empress and the Silkworm by Lily Toy Hong

Activities: Sequencing cards for silk harvesting and pulling your own silk from a cocoon. You can purchase pre-dyed silk cocoons available for $5.95/10 in a variety of colors for the activity. These particular ones are cut so perhaps they are the "humane" type of silk harvest. You can also purchase the kinds where the pupa have been killed before they are able to emerge out of the cocoon and thereby making a hole and shortening the length of silk threads.

Lesson 3: Chinese New Year Celebration

Activities listed: Recipes, Banners, Signs, Puppets, Make lucky money envelopes, Learn to use Chopsticks, etc. One suggestion is to create good luck sign (The link on the scholastic page is not useful so you can try this link). To print more Chinese Characters click on this earlier post on Chinese Calligraphy books and resources. The link for making a dragon puppet is missing on the scholastic site so use this one.

More suggestions: Make an awesome paper machie dragon puppet from "That Artist Woman" blog. Visit activity village for a large array of Chinese New Year printables!

Curriculum resources for teaching kids Chinese Calligraphy

My 4 year old daughter re-discovered her bamboo writing instruments today as she rummaged through her "office" of craft supplies.

She then promptly declared she wanted to do "Chinese inking."

So we printed some tracer pages with Chinese characters for her. I watered down some washable tempra paint for the "ink" and she was happy to work on some chinese writing.

Teaching resources: There are more printables (and gobs of activities) available at Activity Village (UK) and at Circletime kids's world library along with lesson plans at Scholastic. Don't forget to celebrate Chinese New Year!

Children's story books referencing Chinese calligraphy:

Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin - download free activity kit corresponding to the book and learn to write some of the Chinese characters related to the book