Koi Fish Wind Socks

Spring time ushers in the Cherry Blossom Festival, which is a big deal in my town of 300,000 Cherry Blossom Trees. This is the perfect time to introduce my students to Japanese art forms, including ink painting.

I spent weeks working on just a horizontal brushstroke in my college Chinese Calligraphy class, so I know that using a sumi brush and ink is more than a week long project, but this lesson was more about exposure than mastery. We learned some brush strokes to make bamboo and after a couple of days, some of the students really started getting the hang of it. I also taught each student how to write their name in Katakana, which is the Japanese alphabet specifically for foreign words and names.

Younger students made koi fish wind socks out of bulletin board paper, and they used the ends of toilet paper rolls to stamp paint on the paper to make scales. I brought artifacts for students to handle from Japan, including paper lanterns, model of geisha in kimono, bamboo, and a wooden daruma doll, which uses the same principle as the American weeble wobble toys: fall down 7 times, get up 8. This leads to a great conversation about emotional resiliance and endurance.

Japanese Brush Art

I got my Japanese calligraphy kit in Asahikawa 25 years ago. It is the same kit school kids carry to school to grind their ink and practice their brush strokes to master shodo (the way of writing). My low vision students appreciate the high contrast of black ink on white rice paper. My students were amazed at the fact that there is a phonetic alphabet called hiragana, and a separate one for foreign words called katakana, on top of the thousands of kanji characters. No more complaining about our 26 letter alphabet, which by the way, Japanese kids learn as well. I just wrote each student name in Katakana for them to practice.

Then we learned a few brush strokes for a bamboo ink painting. This was just a tiny sampling, as it would take hours and days for them to get very good at it, but there is something relaxing about repeating lines and trying to make them a little better each time. I brought in a piece of bamboo that is much taller than me and could be used to construct a hut, as well as the thin, leave covered bamboo shoots, cut fresh that morning. I showed them bamboo skewers for kabobs on the grill and bamboo paper fans, which they then used to write their name or paint a bamboo image.