The Secret Colors of Plants

After the art and design course last semester, Mrs. Chen wanted to help her students appreciate more beauty in everyday life. She introduced a new lesson called “The Picnic Lesson in Everyday Life,” which brought food and life into the classroom. The students prepared food themselves, applying art and design concepts to their work. Mrs. Chen invited a Home Economics teacher for an interdisciplinary collaboration, where they translated compositional design rules—dots, lines, and planes—into knife skills: dicing, julienning, and slicing.

With this new approach to food preparation, the students created amazing dishes that even they couldn’t believe were made by their own hands. The most important part of the lesson was encouraging the students to step out of the classroom and physically experience life with all their senses.

In the house where Mrs. Tsai used to live, there were no barred windows. When she moved to Hualien, she still couldn’t find the ideal window for her new home. She wondered why most of the windows on the market were similar in materials and styles, and why the traditional wood lattice windows, with their beautiful patterns and fascinating structures, had disappeared.

Determined to find the ideal window, Mrs. Tsai embarked on a journey with her students. Initially, she worried it would be too complicated for them to apply design principles to their window structures. To her surprise, after a semester of art and design courses, the students had developed the ability to observe and practice effectively. They could already use cardboard to create well-structured prototypes based on these principles.

This experience made her realize the profound impact of cultivating aesthetic sensibility through practical life experiences. She saw that the children possessed infinite potential and that life is the best arena to ignite their creative power.

In the Plantae kingdom, there are colors invisible to the human naked eye. To delve deeper into the essence of colors, Mrs. Chang led her students on a walk outside the classroom to closely examine plants. They collected beautiful specimens and brought them back to the lab for interdisciplinary experiments and color analysis. After this fascinating exploration, they were surprised to discover that the plants they see on campus everyday contain more colors than they had imagined.

By extracting colors from the plants and observing the stratification phenomenon, the students learned about the variety and complexity of how nature generates colors. To Mrs. Chang, one of the purposes of the art and design course is to challenge conventions, and this class helped the students realize that leaves and flowers are not merely red and green. Through these scientific experiments, the students developed their ability to observe rationally. Additionally, the course encouraged them to adopt a bolder attitude toward exploring more possibilities.

The art and design course at Jinhua Junior High School, known as the Kang-Ching-Lung Streets Project, was developed collaboratively by all the art teachers. To gain a deeper understanding of their surroundings, the teachers and students left the classroom, planned exploration routes, and conducted field studies in the neighborhood around the campus.

As they wandered the streets, observing and recording various architectures from different eras, they were impressed by their findings: a rich diversity of styles, forms, and textures in the buildings. Back at school, they discussed the suitability of the materials used and explored potential replacements for the buildings. By slowing down and paying more attention to the details on their way to school, the students were amazed at how much they had previously overlooked.