This was our last lesson culminating our artistic tour of China. We studied dragons and what they mean in Chinese culture. In China dragons are a symbol of strength and good luck. The dragon’s qualities are great power, dignity, wisdom, healing, and auspiciousness. Dragons are good, even if they may look scary. They are a symbol of the emperor and are on the imperial seal. During Chinese New Year, especially trained people perform dragon dances, with a beautifully decorated “dragon” made of plastic and paper. The dancers hold up the dragon figure, (which can be as long as 227 feet) on poles, and they mimic the dragon’s movements, snakelike and up and down. We watched a video of the Chinese New Year dragon dance. The children were quite taken with the video, and asked to have it played multiple times.
Today the children chose between two types of crafts. The were able to made a dragon mask, which they could then wear, or a dragon puppet with a flexible “body” which was able to move similar to the video dragon. Because a dragon’s color has special meaning, (gold/silver=money; Red=excitement; Green=great harvest; Yellow=solemn empire) the children were encouraged to try and use as many colors as they wished. When they were done, we mounted the masks and the puppets on sturdy poster paper, cut them out, added glitter, and added ribbons to tie the masks on, and mounted the puppets on sticks to encourage the children to wave them and mimic the movements in the dragon dance video.
The children had fun preparing and then wearing their masks and playing with their dragons.
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