Chinese Dragons

My preschoolers love to paint.  Any kind of paint.  Any subject.

Last week I showed them a short video featuring a Chinese dragon.  That's what they painted.

Chinese New Year Dragon Hats

My preschoolers and kindergarteners watched a portion of a video about Chinese New Year.  I told them how in the olden days, the Chinese people believed that at the new year, bad spirits tried to come into town and stay for the new year.  In order to scare the bad spirits away, people would shoot fireworks; bang pots and pans; and beat drums to scare the spirits away.  Today, in their celebrations, the evil spirits take the shape of a dragon.  One long dragon costume is worn by many people.

The one video that I love the most is an old VCR video from my school library.  Here's a link to the video at Amazon:  http://www.amazon.com/Holidays-Children-Chinese-New-Year/dp/6303314910

There are some decent videos on the web too, though I haven't seen a lot for children.
This is a good one just for some general information for you:

These are some you might want to show your itty bitties:

 

After my students had the introduction to Chinese New Year, I demonstrated how to make their hats.  Now, before the children arrived, I had cut 18"x24" paper into 9"x24" strips.  I chose red today, but you certainly can use any color you like.  I also had staped the strips into cylinders.  These fit the heads of 90% of the students.  10% of the students had to have theirs unstapled to enlarge or decrease in size.

With my kindergarteners, I reminded them how to fold and cut paper into symmetrical shapes.  We did this with the eyes, nose and mouth.  With the preschoolers, I had piles of precut shapes of paper.  They used simple squares, circles, and triangles, and were able to cut them or use them "as is."

After the children finished the dragon faces, I let them get tissue streamers, three at a time.  After they glued these on, they were allowed to come back and get three more.  I allowed this as long as I had streamers available.  

My preschool classes this year run 30 minutes long.  We used every single minute to make these.  I would like to have had more time so that we could have had a dragon parade. 

Drug Out by Dragons

Looking at my photo disk, I am surprised to see so many dragon photos. There are more dragon lessons that I did not even photograph. Chinese New Year coincided with the third grade study of China this year so there were lots of opportunities for the dragon as subject matter.

Preschoolers made Chinese dragon masks, which all together looked like one big dragon costume.

Third graders made Chinese brush paintings of dragons and foil repousse dragons, for which I have no photos. Ugh.

This dragon puppet was a "door knob lesson." (That means you think of the lesson as you are shutting the door after they arrive.) I had a lesson prepared other than this, but when 3/4 of the class was missing because of testing, I had to think of something fast. This was it.


Art Club kids made clay animals and many chose dragons.



Kindergarten dragons. (Those red tree-like things are firecrackers.)






A third grade teacher asked me to help her think of something she could hang in the hall outside of her classroom. Since they were studying Ancient China, I had her kids work in groups to create dragon murals. These are 5' - 6' long. I suggested that she cut these off of the background and mount them on another paper, or paint the background.






I think I am "dragoned" out now.