Day 4: Water and Ink Painting

Today's camp theme was Chinese Shui-mo (水墨）painting, also known as Water and Ink painting. It is one of the oldest continuous artistic tradition in the world, and done with a brush dipped in black or colored ink. Actually, we have been preparing for today's activity from the first day, on Monday, by letting the kids practicing their brush techniques using clear water without ink. Before they started painting with real ink, we first read the story "Little Tapoles Looking for Their Mother" in English, then watched the 100% Chinese (you'll understand why I say it's purely Chinese if you take a look of it) cartoon show of this story. Here's the online link to the movie:

http://youtu.be/2qScNN9ePZE

It's made in the 1970s, purely done by beautiful shui-mo paintings. Before watching the movie, one of the students, a 5 and half years old, asked me: Why you call it beautiful? How can a water and ink painting be beautiful? After watching it and finishing the whole day, at the closing circle, the same child made a comment: "I didn't know water and ink paintings can be beautiful before; but now I knew IT IS" That was such a sweet comment! Hope you all enjoyed it! 

At the painting activity, I requested the students to drew at least one black and white shui-mo painting about the movie they watched this morning; most of them did. Below are displays of their work from the art room today, including some free painting and calligraphy. 

Children are true artists. They really are, especially when engaged in this type of freehand painting style ("xie yi" 写意), as opposed to Western style of realistic ("xie shi" 写实) painting.  Here are more pictures of artists at work: 

Meanwhile, there are other learning and fun activities going on in-and-outside of the classroom:

Thanks for the TAs and intern teacher, for their dedicated support to our classroom! The students were surely benefited from them being around and available! Also, we are grateful to the older kids who were kind and smart enough to be the teachers' helpers at many occasions! This is such a good team. We have been truly enjoying our camp days so far. It's going to be sad to say good-bye tomorrow......