Chinese New Year 2016: The Year of the MONKEY

February provides a wealth of integrated arts inspiration for Art Teachers! February 8th (2016) is Chinese New Year--the Year of the Monkey. Here are some of the projects from my site that I've done with my students over the years along with some resources and projects from the interweb that I love. 

My previous posts:

Chinese Calligraphy Placemats/Posters

Easy Paper Lanterns

Dragon Puppets

Projects I LOVE from around the web:

• Simple dragon puppet from Red Ted's Art Blog
• These simple banners (no original link--just a photo). Sorry, I love anything with crepe paper streamers!
• Thumbprint Lanterns from Let's Go Fly a Kite (you gotta look at this one--so cool!)
• Chinese Dragon Puppets from Olive Art!! Do You???
• Fingerprint Cherry Blossom Lantern (with FREE Printable) from Imagination Box

And a recipes to enjoy:

Rainbow Chicken Fried Rice

Resources I've used:

• "China: DK Eyewitness Books," by Poppy Sebag-Montefiore (A nice overview of China and Chinese culture. The book has some clear, beautiful images of calligraphy, writing, and dragon costumes).

• "Gung Hay Fat Choy," by June Behrens (This is a great nonfiction book that has lots of pictures and info about Chinese New Year. I love the pictures of the dragons used in the Dragon Dance).

• "Moonbeams, Dumplings & Dragon Boats," by Nina Simonds, Leslie Swartz & The Children's Museum, Boston (A wonderful book of Chinese holiday tales, activities and recipes).

• "The Boy Who Painted Dragons,"by Demi (All of Demi's books are beautiful! This artist has been known to paint with a mouse's whisker! She's also created books on Mother Theresa, Mary and Jesus).

• "The Kid's Multicultural Art Book," by Alexandra M. Terzian (This is a great go-to book for a number of crafts from around the world. A must for an art teacher's personal collection. I love the whole series of art books for children by this publisher).

• "The Paper Dragon," by Marguerite W. Davol (LOVE this book! And artist saves his village from a dragon by using creativity and intelligence. A great book!)

• "You Can Write Chinese," by Kurt Wiese (A bit dated, but the way the information about Chinese symbols is presented is wonderful and very kid-friendly).

• A China Family Adventure. http://www.china-family-adventure.com/chinese-writing-symbols.html (Accessed January 2012) This site has a section entitled, "Learning Chinese Writing Symbols for Kids" that has some wonderful, clear images of chinese calligraphy and a nice chart that shows the evolution of a few Chinese characters (this is where you will see that the original Chinese character for rain looks like rain falling from a cloud)

• Chinese Calligraphy By Kids. http://library.thinkquest.org/3614/intro.htm (Accessed January 2012) A wonderful website by two elementary girls that is very child-friendly and has a ton of wonderful information about Chinese calligraphy, great picture examples and explanation of some symbols and the combination of symbols. Lovely!

Easy Posters? Check this out!

We head back to school next week in these neck of the woods, so some of you may still need a bit of BLING for your classroom! I understand! If you haven't seen, scroll back a few posts and you'll see two posters I've made available for free for you to print out and use around your school and home...

"But, I want MORE!" You say? No problem!

Well, at least, no problem for ME--I'm not going to make more posters, but you can--and it takes really only a couple of minutes with this new (to me) site I stumbled upon called www.recitethis.com.

Super easy directions:

1. You go to the site www.recitethis.com

2. Type in a couple of words, phrases, a quote, etc. (the only part I don't like is that I want to credit the quoted person a bit smaller than the rest of the quote, but it doesn't let you futz with that--it's automatic).

3. Choose a layout you like from the preview selection in the scrollbar at the bottom of the page.

4. Click "create"

And....

BOOM! You are done! You can download the poster (to print), email it, share it on Facebook and more.

Here are a couple I made this afternoon...

ENJOY!

Free Posters! A Back-To-School Gift For You!

Hello there!

I have received a TON of feedback about the following posters I have created! It seems as though everyone wants a copy or two! So here's my gift to you: FREE POSTERS! 

How to get the files:

Visit my Google Docs page at:

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0Byb1fmno7uIvSGRDSmtDZHJpYjg&usp=sharing

And you'll be able to download the pdf files of both of these posters. For you. For FREE!! Yippee! They are both 11" x 17" and print out nicely--the colors are lovely! 

The Fine Print:

Please feel free to print these posters out and share them, but no selling them and no changing the text. Also, please leave my name and copyright info on the posters. If you decide to publish the posters in a newsletter or such, please make sure you credit me (and you could email me at bpettus02@gmail.com--I'd love to see how you've shared them!).

So print, share, enjoy! 

And, happy "Back to School!"

Andy Goldsworthy Nature Sculptures

My Spring Art class headed outside to create some beautiful Nature Sculptures inspired by Andy Goldsworthy. Many of the children weren't familiar with his work, but really got inspired as we looked at a book I had brought called, "Hand to Earth." As we flipped through the pages, they were amazed at his work and itching to get started!

I had wanted a quick lesson where they could create outside and had intended that while they were creating their sculptures, I would work with small groups to make sun prints--a natural link, in my opinion. But alas, the weather didn't cooperate and the sun prints were a no-go due to the sun going away as soon as class started! At least it didn't rain! :-)

Unfortunately, the students can't take something him from a class like this--we even needed to destroy them before we left--that was hard for some. But, I brought the iPad and took some photos of each sculpture. Once I went home, I used PicCollage to bring all of the images from class together into a collage that could be printed as a poster--a very pretty one, I'd say! I emailed those out that afternoon to the families so the children could remember their sculptures forever.

This is a great lesson! The prep is pretty minimal, of course, but it really gets a good discussion going about the following themes:

• Looking closely at nature
• Being good stewards of the land
• Working together as a team/taking turns/helping
• Elements of art/principles of design
• What is sculpture?
• What is art?
• The job of artist (How does an artist get paid for work such as this? What inspires an artist? How long will pieces like this last in nature?)

So, here's the final poster--enjoy!

Justifying ART and Art Education

SIGH. Challenging day today. I can't be frank because I will offend. Let's just say I am feeling like I am having to "sell" arts education and that is frustrating. So, I'm not going to grumble, or complain, or yell...I am going to advocate.

Here's a poster I made that talks about the benefits that art has on a child...

And here are some close-up images of the poster so you can read the info. The images aren't the best, but if I make them too "nice" then blogger grumbles about the file sizes.

Great references. Thank you to them for their info. This poster is not for money-making purposes, it was intended as an arts advocacy project for my grad school. Thanks!