Paper Kite Project

 

A student uses a dot maker to decorate his kite in the early stages of construction

Kites originated in ancient China for military purposes (measuring distances and wind patterns). I like to remind my students who are blind, that Braille was originally used as a code to read at night without enemy armies being able to see lanterns and detect the location French troops. As we enter March and learn about Chinese history, kite making and flying makes for some fun memories. 

My students in class use bamboo for the skeleton for their kite shape, but those at home used straws, one end inserted into another until they are several straw lengths. A small kite can use 3 straws vertically and 2 straws for the cross section and tape may be used to reinforce these. The two straw sticks" should be tied at the cross section for strength.

For my simple demo, I cut a large diamond shape from piece of thin paper, such as bulletin board paper, using the straws as a pattern by cutting an inch or two longer and wider the straw lengths. I actually started with half a diamond, folding it in half and matching the second half. Next, I used paper scraps to make small triangles to hold the ends of the straws in place. I just glued along the outside of two sides, leaving the inside of the triangle open so that straws could be removed. Then, I folded and glued the edges of the kite in for strength and tidiness, like a hem.

This would be a great time to remove the straws and decorate the kite before inserting them, but I continued with the construction by tying  string to the side ends of the cross bar (horizontal straws) before taping them to the paper. The string should be about 50% longer than the length of the cross bar, so that it comes out from the kite. Then I tied a very long piece of string to the center of the attached string.

Finally, I tied a ribbon coming from the bottom straw. I made bows from rectangles of matching paper scraps, pinched and tied in the middle, but fabric or ribbon. Long strips of crepe paper or plastic table strips can work as well for a tail. All that is left is testing it out in the great outdoors. Let's go fly a kite!

Japanese Relief Prints and Haiku Lesson

Printmaking and Japan are both very dear to my heart, which is why I was surprised when I realized that I hadn't taught this lesson on Hiroshige wood cuts for five years. I read my favorite Japanese counting book, "One Leaf Rides the Wind" as a way to introduce my students to haikus and Japanese culture. I lead a slide discussion and offered students artifacts from Japan to handle before letting them dress up in a kimono and posing in front of a backdrop of a rock garden, Mount Fuji, and cherry blossoms. Then we looked at the 180 year old ukiyo-e (floating world pictures) .  Edo (now Tokyo) was becoming a growing city as merchants were moving up in class and had money to spend on night life. Hiroshige documented women in kimonos, koi fish wind socks, and fireworks in his well composed wood cuts.

I used hot glue to make the reproductions tactile.  One student thought a geisha was wearing roller skates instead of okobo shoes.

I passed around large block of carved wood, brayer, and ink before doing a demonstration of a relief print.  We drew into foam for our prints, but the idea is the same: ink sticks to the top part and the printed image is a mirror of the original. After students wrote (and Brailled) haikus, created and printed several of their own images, these were mounted and shared.  One student, who is about to graduate, is missing a friend who would have been in this graduating class had she survived cancer as a middle school student. She reflected on that friend for her project.  This poem and print will be framed and placed on an empty chair at graduation in a couple weeks to remember LaStacia. Her mother will then take it home and hopefully understand that we remember their family at this time. This is the power of fine arts: they make it possible to teach so many subjects (ie. social studies and language arts) while also allowing for personal expression and a means to touch the hearts of others. 

School Mural

This year we, on the school media committee, decided to do several school-wide media festivals, each under the theme "Georgia On My Mind" and so we had a couple Georgia authors, such as Carmen Deedy come to work some story telling magic one day; another day we had a character parade and presentations on the people of Georgia. I had my students talk about the natives who lived on what is currently the Ocmulgee Indian Mounds, and make the coil pots in the same style and using the same techniques of people 10,000 years ago. For our final big hoorah, I worked with a couple of students, to create a mural of some favorite landmarks from various spots in Georgia:  Macon, Savannah, Atlanta, St. Simon's Island, and Cumberland Island.

I painted the outlines of the mural in chalk and traced them in bold black so my visually impaired students could see. One had the task of painting large areas like the sky and sand, while the other did small areas of under-painting, like the Indian Mound, or a tree.

By three Friday classes, we had most of the painting finished, but I realized that some of the buildings looked a little crooked, so I came in some afternoons on my own and ended up completing the whole thing myself, although my helpers feel good about their ownership in the piece.


With every mistake, one of my students kept saying, "Oops. That's OK, you'll just paint over it."  I loved that she wasn't beating herself up, but I finally asked why she thinks that I'm supposed to step in and fix every mistake, and so she changed her mantra to: "Oops. That's OK, I'll just paint over it." And that realization, that it's just paint and any mistakes can be fixed with more paint, is exactly what is needed to have the courage to do a big project like this. The four large stage sets we did during the course of the year, was perfect preparation for me to try to make my mistakes in public (in the cafeteria lobby rather than my own classroom). Lots of people had opinions about what landmarks I should be adding, but I would tell them to feel free to use their great ideas when they do their mural.

Here are some details so you can see my how large and loose brush strokes can work from a distance.