Calligraphy

During history we are talking about Ancient China. We have had some fun playing around with the 7 strokes that make up Chinese characters. Our history activity book had some characters they could copy. I showed them the first Chinese character you see on the left and I asked them what they thought the character might be.

GooseyGirl promptly answered, "A mess." :)

Actually it means "Woman". Do you see the woman with the child on her lap? Isn't that cool?

The kidlets then tried their hand at writing a Chinese character. The first one you see is by Gooseygirl and means "tree".

I decided to challenge Birdman a little so I asked him to make up a character for "Sun". What he came up with really impressed me. Do you see the land with the sun rising and setting above it? Isn't that great?

I held my breath as I asked RocketMan to make up a character that means flower. He isn't comfortable in the land of creativity and many times will dissolve in tears if you ask him to just invent something. He is very legalistic and a major perfectionist (gee, I wonder where that comes from). Most of the time he gets anxious when he steps outside of his comfort zone. I was so pleased when he willingly took a leap of faith and just made something up. Can you see the stem and the petals? How about the bee coming in to get some pollen?