Calligraphy Work

In our Maple Tree Montessori classroom this week we have started offering very simple calligraphy for the children. We have take a chinese character for example, mountain and broken it down into its strokes. We have then displayed the strokes in sequence so that the children can write their own form of the character using a special calligraphy brush and a water color hue of their choice. The children seem to enjoy this activity. The Chinese characters we are employing are an ideogram, a written symbol that represents an idea or object directly rather than a particular word or speech sound. Many of the simpler ideograms often resemble simple pictures of the object they represent.