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Albert Kahn’s Paris gardens are, like any garden, a perceptible and physical context ; they appear to us with colours, smells and sounds, tactile feelings ; these feelings, stored in voluntary or involuntary memory, are a source for imagination.
OBJECTIVES
To stimulate sensorial exploration
To appeal to imagination
To structure languages
SKILLS
To perceive sensations in a reasoned way
To use tools that enable awareness of these sensations
To learn to articulate verbal and plastic language.
MATERIALS
“windows ? and other variously shaped centring tools
mirrors
notebooks, paper chalk, pastel crayons
cameras, pencils
scarves
collecting boxes, a press
REFERENCES
Albert Kahn’s garden or views of that garden
Aline Rutily’s « Carnets de jardins » (Garden notebooks)
PROCEDURES
1) List sensations
>When you are in a garden, how can you pay more attention to what you perceive rather than to what you know or think you know ?
eyesight
Ask the children to single out details to be observed in a Japanese garden : the outline of the portico or the red bridge that cross over the pond, the details of the statue of a dragon or the bronze lanterns, the veins in the stone, the line of the stone-paved paths, the dwarf trees pruned the Japanese way, the various very wide perspectives exposed to their gaze.
Make them pick out the various shapes in a fruit garden : apple trees, pear trees, plum trees pruned in the shape of a distaff, a spindle, a beaker or a sphere…
With their eyes they follow the regular lines of the alleys and lawns of a formal garden, the symmetry of its flowerbeds, the layout of the patches of colour, the details of the architecture of the “Palmarium greenhouse"
Get them to grasp the details of the flowers as they look at them from a short distance, or the patches they make when seen form afar, of the winding lines of a landscape garden…
The children make palettes and colour charts with pastel crayons : they pick out the shades of the plants, from the “Blue Forest ? to the “Vosges Forest ?, the splendid pinks of the Japanese cherry trees, the wide range of the reds of the azaleas, turning purplish-blue or orange, the reds of the maple-trees, in autumn…
They use the mirrors to create surprising effects, to brake the scale. Keep traces of these experiments on photographs…
touch
The children move about in the garden, blindfolded, for a better exploration and comparison of the tactile characteristics of its elements.
They bring back, classify, keep and choose elements that will be stored in the pages of the notebook : samples of earth, plant elements fallen to the ground, twigs …
smell
With the same tools, they list smells : the fragrance of flowers, of some leaves, of fruit, of the earth, of grass.
sound elements (bird songs, for example) :
With the same approach they can be recorded while they walk about in order to make a catalogue of sounds to explore, identify, qualify…
2) Language structure :
During each step, words and sentences are written down in order to
qualify the sensations they have listed
express what everyone feels
Mental images spring from this articulation between various languages ; choices are made, they create their own personal itinerary, which will structure the realisation of each “travel diary ?.
FOLLOW-ON ACTIVITIES
To gather information about
the history of Albert Kahn’s garden, of the Albert Kahn Museum
the work of Albert Kahn
garden vegetation (trees, plants with or without flowers…)
the animals which live in a garden
ASSESSMENT
It will measure the diversity of
what has been collected
projects of plastic realisations
the interest given to Albert Kahn’s work.
Aline Rutily conseillère pédagogique Arts visuels Saint Germain -en-Laye (Yvelines) France