Learning about Asian Art

All my classes are venturing in to the realm of art from other cultures. It's so interesting to hear the dialogue and have discussions about student's thoughts on this art. Some art from other places in the world is so different than what we typically think of as art. It's fun to learn the differences and also to learn about what art looked like in ancient times.

First grade students learn about art from ancient Asian and we are smack dab in the middle of all that learning. We talked first about the art of ancient Japan and we learned about Gyotaku which is the art of fish printing. There's a great video here that talks about where the tradition came from. We used rubber fish and painted on them with tempera paint. Then placed paper of top and rubbed them. During the next class, students glued their piece to a colorful background and decorated the border. Then we learned how to write our names in Japanese and the students signed their name with red paint, just like a traditional Han or Hanko stamp.

To explore the ancient art of Asian even further, we moved into talking about China. We talked about the emperors and how their families would rule for years and their last names were very famous. We talked specifically about the Ming family and all the contributions they made to China, including the Great Wall and Ming Vases. Our project was to draw, color and decorate three Ming Vases. Students drew a small, medium, and large vase. Then we colored them in using only blue oil pastel and then painted over them using white tempera paint. Because of course, Ming Vases are all blue and white! Then students used pointy sticks to etch out designs through the white paint, down to the blue oil pastel. They cut out their finished vases and glued them onto pink paper. During our last class, we painted black bamboo shoots coming out of the Ming Vases and then they wrote their names in Chinese using Sharpie markers. The results are awesome! We loved learning about Asian art!