Asian Banners

After spending 6 or 7 classes on the Chinese Dragon Puppets, my fourth graders needed a quickie project to hold their attention and get another piece of finished work on the walls. These Asian Banners fit the bill quite nicely!

Here's the skinny on these skinny projects (har har). Kiddos grabbed a long, narrow sheet of paper and folded it accordion-style.

This year, I splurged on Dippity Dye paper.* At one building, we used liquid watercolor (slightly diluted with tap water), which gave us 6 color options; the other building used homemade liquid watercolors made from dried-out markers soaked in water. The homemade colors were far superior!

The accordion, still folded, got double-dipped into a set of analogous colors.

Papers were unfolded and laid out to dry till next time.

On the second day, we watched the following video:

Then, everyone fashioned a hanging thingamajig (quality vocab, check) for their banner. A slip knot wedged between some scrap black paper did the trick, as I didn't have enough wooden dowels, chopsticks, or some facsimile thereof and didn't care to mess with them anyway.

Students chose several Chinese characters to paint onto their banners in a vertical arrangement. (You could use any Asian language, of course; I opted for Chinese, as I have several students of Chinese descent.) I had one of my buildings use true India Ink, while the other used black tempera. While the India ink soaked into the Dippity Dye paper very quickly and therefore wasn't as easy to work with as the paint, I reeeeally prefer the look of the ink.

With black tempera

With India ink

Some of my kiddos opted to paint their names instead of a few random characters--I provided them with a website where they could look up their names to print out and bring along for the second day, if they so desired.

These bright banners will look great hanging around the halls!

* Personally, I have mixed feelings about the Dippity Dye paper. I found that thin, student-grade watercolor paper works just fine for this particular project. That being said, the Dippity Dye paper is nice and does a significantly better job of blending of colors and creating a tie-dye effect. It's extremely thin, though, and therefore easily ripped. I'm curious about the name-brand Dippity Dye--I wonder if it could possibly blend and be any more brilliant than our homemade liquid watercolors.

 
P.S. I'm still looking for book recommendations to amp up the art room library! Please help!