sessions 9 and 10: field trip

[Anonymous]

I must advertise to my students that the emperor's terra cotta warriors are returning to the Bowers Museum. I must make time to go visit them while they are here this fall and winter. To think that thousands were made is pretty amazing, and even more so is that they are all different. What a huge amount of manpower it must have taken. The unemployment rate must have been very low during that dynasty!

[Anonymous]

I will definitely use info on the Silk Road and the multiple paths it took to discuss with my students the importance of commerce for the the spread of art, political systems, ideas (ie Confucianism). I agree with previous posts that the hands on table would be valuable, even for high school students.

[Anonymous]

Not my first time to a Japanese garden, but the first time to really appreciate all the details of one. The docent's explanations were great and helped me appreciate the various elements more (like the 3's; plant, water, and rock; the meticulous way everything's being cultivated, reasons for the zig-zag bridge, etc). I'll definitely use the info to help my students appreciate that aspect of Japanese culture more. Searching online, I just realized there's a 6-acre Japanese garden that was patterned after Korakuen in Okayama, San Jose's sister city, very near the school where I teach! (San Jose Japanese Friendship Garden http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bX-NjzbbMA&feature=related) That makes an inexpensive field trip.

[Anonymous]

I really enjoyed the field trip. I had never heard of the Bowers Museum and that was my first experience in a Japanese garden. I took lots of photos that I'm excited about using in my classroom. It was interesting to learn about the types of gardens found in a Japanese garden. I thought it was interesting to know the reasoning behind the raked lines in the rock garden where the horizontal lines represented waves and the circles around the rocks were ripples. I also learned many other interesting facts at both places ranging in topics from the tea house to oracle bones to the legend about how silk was accidentally discovered. Very nice trip!

[Anonymous]

Mary Green, one of the docents we met at the Bowers Museum, had a timeline shaped like a dragon with the Chinese dynasties listed from tail to head. I finally found a timeline like it that is part of a lesson plan for 4th graders on the dynasties. Here is where you can find the much coveted dragon timeline. I'm thinking of tracing it and leaving out the dynasties so my students can fill them in.
edited by rfontana on 8/13/2011

[clay dube]

Hi Folks,
On Friday, we'll be visiting the CSU Long Beach Japanese garden and the Bowers Museum in Orange County. Both of these facilities have extensive education programs with downloadable materials for teachers. The garden's offerings are geared at elementary students, but there are no doubt elements that could be adapted for older students. The Bowers materials focus on pre-modern China.

Japanese garden
http://www.csulb.edu/~jgarden/education/edu.html

Bowers
http://www.bowers.org/index.php/learn/k12

Some other Japanese gardens:
Balboa Park http://www.balboapark.org/in-the-park/japanese-friendship-garden
Huntington (currently closed) http://huntington.org/huntingtonlibrary.aspx?id=512
UCLA http://www.japanesegarden.ucla.edu/
Van Nuys http://www.thejapanesegarden.com/area.html

Article about Chinese gardens:
http://www.uschina.usc.edu/article@usct?growing_to_new_proportions_chinese_gardens_in_the_u_s_11917.aspx

Please use this area to post comments and raise questions. What other museum collections/temples, etc. could you access in your area? Which have the best websites?

[Anonymous]

I also have been to numerous Japanese Gardens but none of the others had such an informative docent to explain how all the elements have a purpose and create a sense of unity. The video that Tony recommended, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bXNjzbbMA&feature=related,
really offers an outstanding virtual tour of the San Jose Japanese Friendship Garden. How fortunate that your school is near.
I found the web site http://www.japanorbit.com/japanese-culture/japanese-garden.html provides the history and the basic elements and design as well as the difference style of gardens in Japan. I plan to have the students review this site first and then show then the San Jose Japanese Friendship Garden. If time permits I would like to go back over the video and stop along the way so the students can identify the elements they learned from the first web site.

[Author]

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