A volunteer group from Japan visited children in Takeo.
They proposed they'd like to share Japanese Tanabata (star festival) culture with smaller-grade children, since it was July. So we planned to introduce the origin of the festival and make Tanabata ornaments, which is what people put on bamboo grasses to celebrate Tanabata in Japan. In this way we can exchange cultures and we can provide children with an opportunity of papercrafting.
We made a picture-story show to talk about Tanabata.
Then we started to make a fan with Japanese traditional paper. We dyed the paper with water color. Before actually dying, children needed to make mountain folds & valley folds with the paper, and even to fold it triangular… This work was already quite challenging for some children. And to dye, we asked children to produce more colors by mixing a few colors that we handed out.
After everyone’s paper was dried, which took about 1 hour, children cut it along a round line and paste it along the fan frame. Each work of all these were new for most of them. Everyone did well with good concentration.
During the 1 hour while waiting for the paper to get dried, we taught children how to make paper ornaments, such as the Milky Way and a lantern. Children were very happy to put what they made on bamboo grasses.
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