Sakura, Japanese Cherry Blossom. An interpretation from the recycling

0 32

Written by

Photography my Passion, my Family my Heart, Education my Devotion and Venezuela my Nation.

3 years ago

In community: Parenting(c55d)

Topics: Photography, Creativity, Education, Recycling

Greetings dear readers, I hope you are doing great, this time I am back to tell you about an activity that I did some time ago with my oldest daughter. We really enjoyed it a lot, so I want to share it with you, because, with the quarantine our children are at home for a long time and sometimes they get bored, this is a good option to distract them.

At that time my daughter was in the 3rd grade of elementary school and they were in the middle of a project called "Taking Care of Our Environment". Within the framework of this project, the children, including my daughter, carried out different activities aimed at forming in them an awareness of respect for the environment.

One of the last assignments consisted of making a natural figure out of recycled material, and the children were free to build whatever they chose. In the case of my princess, she came up with the idea that she wanted to make a tree, so... although I was worried about the idea, since at first I did not imagine how we could do it, I asked her... And what tree do you want to make?... her answer also surprised me, since she said she wanted a Japanese Cherry tree in bloom. It was then when I started my search on the internet, although I have seen them many times in pictures, I wanted to be clear of how is its structure and its flowers in order to discuss with her the strategy that we followed for its construction.

Sakura, Japanese Cherry tree Source

The flowering cherry tree, is an elegant tree, and really beautiful, in addition, after reading a little about it, I learned that the Japanese call it Sakura, even, it is one of the most known symbols within the Japanese culture. It has a lot of meaning... for example, for this culture the flower of this tree is considered, among other things, as the image of the drops of blood that the samurai spill in battle.

Japanese Cherry Blossoms Source

It took us a while to decide what we would do, but after a few deliberations, we finally agreed. With a definite goal in mind, it was time to select the recycled materials that would best fit what we needed to build. Also, they had to be easy to work with, because most of the work had to be done by my daughter... in the end, we decided to us

Image Trunk cut into cardboard

Image Trunk painted and armed

We had already solved part of the problem, now we had to define how we would make the flowers. But then, I remembered that, during my daughter's first preschool year, her teacher asked for egg cartons to be sent to her to do an activity at school. As the days went by, the little girl came home from school with a big smile on her face and proudly handed me a nice little bouquet of flowers. To my surprise, the flowers were made with painted egg cartons. I had to resort again to our great friend the internet and of course we easily found how to make them. Here is the sequence of images so you can see more or less how was the process of making our cherry blossoms.

Step 1: Cutting the flowers

Step 2: Painting the flowers

Flowers in different stages of painting

Flowers and trunk ready

Once we finished painting the flowers and the trunk, we had to find a base where to place the tree, it was then that I remembered that I had a little box with a portrait holder. It was perfect to make the base we needed. Next step was to glue the tree trunk using hot silicone of course, this work was done by me, because it was very small and could burn. As a last step, once the glue was dry, we proceeded to distribute and glue the flowers on the branches of the trunk.

First flowers glued to the trunk

Now I show you the finished tree, for me it was beautiful and my daughter was very proud of her work, her eyes were shining with joy.

Finished tree

Another view of the finished tree

I hope you enjoyed my story, I for my part, as always, enjoyed helping my daughter to make her Sakura tree. I hope that what I present to you will be useful and that you will have the opportunity to build your own tree with your children, nephews, nieces, grandchildren or siblings.