Saturday, November 24, 2012

Kindergarten Cherry Tree Paintings

For Cultural Heritage Week, my Kinders learned about the meaning of cherry trees/blossoms in Chinese and Japanese cultures. We also used aesthetic scanning to discuss Women and Blossoming Trees by X Torii Kiyonaga, 1786. from the Art Institute of Chicago's website. We see the women having a little get together under the cherry trees. The students were also challenged to look for shapes and patterns. (When I was trying to come up with something from Art History that depicted cherry blossoms, I found this resource from the KU Center for East Asian Studies- if you are in the area, they have also have awesome "trunks" you can check out with objects from China, Japan, and Korea.)
X Torii Kiyonaga Japanese, 1752-1815 Women and Blossoming Trees (Naka no machi no sakura), c. 1786

Source: artic.edu via Katie on Pinterest
After the first day discussion, the students used lines of dark brown paint to form a cherry branch on light blue construction paper.
In the second class period, each table got a tray of magenta and white paint so the students could create different tints while painting the blossoms on their cherry trees. I thought about having the students add a self portrait "under" their trees but they actually filled the space for once so there wasn't room! 

 


2 comments:

  1. Beautiful! I love cherry blossom tree projects; they turn out so beautiful, and you can teach so much history and culture with it :).

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  2. Love this for kinder!

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