K2B class reads Elmer the Elephant Story!

Dear friends from K1,

I´m so excited hearing from you! 

Tomorrow I will read your letter to my students, they will get excited too!!

We really enjoyed making this project, my students got so happy when they first listened about the project, we did the same as you did, we found on the internet where Finland is on the map, they got surprise to see how far we are from each other, also we looked some pictures that we found on google of your school, they couldn't wait to sent the project to you!

We read Elmer the elephant story, they loved it, so our character is Elmer, you will receive many different elephants, we hope you like it too!! 

My student will be very happy to see all your projects, because guess what!! they love Frozen, Dora, Spiderman, Pokemon and all the characters you mention too!! 

When we made our projects we were celebrating Mexico´s Independence day! So if you can see in the pictures some of them were wearing Mexican clothes to commemorate this day.

Is nice to hear that you had a sunny day when you made the project, right now here in Monterrey is very hot!!

We sent a big hug to everybody!!

We are so excited keeping in touch with you!!

With lots of love,
Ms. Gaby, Ms. Kasandra and all K2B class!!

Elmer the Patchwork Elephant is a children's picture book series by the British author David McKee.

K2B class from San Patricio Colegio in Monterrey, Mexico are making and sharing art with the K1 class at International School of Helsinki in Helsinki, Finland.

K1 and all their charismatic characters!

Dear Kinder B,

We are so happy to be friends with you all at Colegio San Patricio in Monterrey, Mexico! We had fun making our characters from our favorite stories for you.

To get started we first looked online to see where Monterrey is on the map. You are really far from Finland! Good thing we figured out how to travel to you! We've got many options, such as boat, airplane, helicopter, and we could swim if we really wanted to.

It was a sunny day in Helsinki when we made our artworks, which made it extra fun to explore the mixing of these colored silk papers. The sun makes everything look so beautiful! What is the weather like in Monterrey now?

In K1 many of us like Elsa. Do you know which story this character is from? Frozen! We also like Doodle from Blue Hat Green Hat, Spiderman, Dora, Transformers, Batman, Lego Ninjago, Lego Chima, Cinderella, Pokemon, and Emma. 

What stories do you like? Which characters?

Looking forward to hearing from you all!

With love,
Ms Tucker, Ms Maaninka, Ms Longmore, Mr Hubbard, and all the fun-loving kids in K1

The 4-5 year old artists at International School of Helsinki in Helsinki, Finland are making and sharing art with Kinder B at Colegio San Patricio in Monterrey, Mexico.

Excitement at EtonHouse!

Our children are excited to send mails to your children. They asked, " Ms Rachel, Are you saying that we are going to receive mails from the children in Mexico?!" When I said, 'Yes!', they jumped with joy. Sharing an art work is a excellent idea. 

In fact we had a show and tell with all the children about their mailboxes and they all gave unique descriptions. The Lights, Camera, Action! Dear You Art Project was well received by the children. The sticky contact papers often got stuck together and had to be pulled apart. Children were exploring with the materials. Perhaps after the project, I will suggest an open-ended experience with the materials that you suggested. Most of them enjoyed tracing the pictures while others decided to draw the pictures on their own. A child was very focused and wanted to use specific coloured tissue papers for specific part of the drawing and was concerned when the tissue paper couldn't be cut into the exact shape and size. Another child preferred to use the markers alone with the contact paper.

Exploring the unique properties of the materials would be my next objective. We haven't used it with torch or the projector or paint. We will do more later.

The children shared that they have to go to the Airport to send their mails since the mails have to take the flight just like us. Interesting! Looks like we have to do an inquiry on how mails travel around the world.

The children will do a show and tell upon completion and experience light effects on the Art pieces.

Today we also did a Mexican dance at school. It was fun.

Thank you again!

Love,
Rachel

Post Box Central at 215 EtonHouse Bilingual Pre-School in Singapore

Last week Ms Rachel had this great idea that the kids make their own mail box at home and bring it for show and tell this week. So when the kids receive their mail from their friends in Mexico each one of them will have it put by the teacher in their mail box. She has informed me that there are quite a lot of interesting looking ones. 

Below are pictures of some of the mail boxes made by our children at home with the aid of their parents.

Regards,
Ms Pema and Ms Rachel

Nursery 2A and Nursery 2B, 3-4 year olds at 215 Eton House Bi-Lingual Preschool in Singapore are making and sharing art with the 4 year olds from Nursery B at Colegio San Patricio in Monterrey, Mexico.

The Tigers tell it all!

The Tigers from Your School in Espoo, Finland are bubbling in their seats about their new friends in Nursery A from Colegio San Patricio Cumbres in Monterrey, Mexico.  Both groups of artists are 4 years old.

In the first project, Lights, Camera, Action!, we made artworks of a character from our favorite story. This is our introductory piece of art to getting to know each other.  The sun was also a tool to create our art with.  Good thing the sun was shining bright in Finland!

The stories liked were Goldilocks, Batman, Tree Monster, My Little Pony, Spiderman, Batman, Shark Story, Magical Fairy, Superman, Ten Little Monkeys Jumping on a Bed, and Ninja.  Do you like these stories too?  Which characters do you like from the story?

We can't wait to meet you!

With love,
Arlene, Toti, Zeynab and The Tigers

Dynamic Dinosaurs sound their surroundings!

Happy Spring Everyone!

We are happy to share our “Sounding our Surroundings” products with us! We enjoyed collecting some leaves before we start to it. Then we focused on sounds we hear while we are sitting or playing in the garden.

After that we started our Project at the tables and try to focus on sounds around us. When we hear noise we preferred to paint fast, when we hear quite sounds we paint slow.

We also change our painting styles depending on sound level too. Such as some of us painted more circular when it is noisy and painted straight lines when it is quiet.

We enjoyed painting with the leaves and we hope you’ll like them as much as we do!

Warm regards,
Dynamic Dinosaurs. 

The 4-5 year old Dynamic Dinosaurs from Açi Preschool in Istanbul, Turkey are making and sharing art with the artists from Praxis School in Mysore, India.

Dance party in Hanoi, inspired by Cape Towners!

Look what arrived today! The kids were so excited to see the rhythmic paintings from South Africa!  We have them all displayed proudly in our classroom!

The 4 year old Puppies from Just Kids in Hanoi, Vietnam are making and sharing art with the 3-6 year olds at Oakdale Montessori School in Cape Town, South Africa.

Enjoy your meal : )

What a creative and colourful project this was!

We have learnt so much about ourselves and our friends across the oceans by doing this project. The children were so excited to show off all of their new geographical knowledge. We have marked all of the places we know on a large map, so now we can easily find them. 

We remembered all of the projects in this series so far, our masks decorated with skin patterns, our rhythmic paintings using so many painting objects and our food book. Now it's time to combine them all! We started a discussion about our dinner table, and what we need to put on it. Plates, knives and forks, chopsticks? What about under them? We need a beautiful table cloth or placemats. We gathered a range of objects in different shapes and sizes. We found cd's and blocks, triangles and rectangles and squares. 

We started by choosing one shape and we made some traces with it. Then we chose a second shape and then a third if we wanted. We watched how the lines overlapped and it made different shapes on the inside.

When we were finished it was time to colour! We coloured each section with a different colour. How amazing and bright they looked with all these beautiful colours.

When we were finished we all looked at each other's and tried to put them together to make one big table cloth, but we decided that it was much more exciting if each guest at our international dinner table had a different piece of art under their plate.

The children have absolutely loved being a part of the Dear You project. Now as the little Tiger cubs and Puppies graduate their last year in kindergarten, they enter big school with knew knowledge of cultures, geography, creativity and wonder. 

Thank you for letting us be a part of this project and we hope to continue work with you in years to come.

Lots of love to our friends overseas,
Teacher Steph, the Tiger Cubs and the Puppies.

Below are pictures from the workshop with the Puppies.

Below are pictures from the workshop with the Tiger Cubs.

The 4 year old Puppies from Just Kids in Hanoi, Vietnam are making and sharing art with the artist Tigers at Your School in Espoo, Finland.  The 4 year old Tigers at Just Kids are making and sharing art with the 3-6 year olds at Oakdale Montessori School in Cape Town, South Africa.

Books open up so many questions!

Last week we did the book workshop. The workshop was very intense.

I think it was a good experience for kids to think about the food.  Children had drawn their favorite foods and then the ingredients separately. I asked children many questions how food is made and where the ingredients for the food come from. Children had many questions and it was interesting to see how they are figuring out the food chain.

Kristina Laine

Kristina Laine and her 4-5 year old artists at Kalinka Päiväkoti in Helsinki, Finland are making and sharing art with Evelyn Müürsepp and her 5-7 year old artists in Mooste Preschool in Mooste, Estonia.

Patterns received in Cape Town!

Everybody at Oakdale Montessori School in Cape Town, South Africa look so happy to have received their handmade patterns from Tigers from Just Kids School in Hanoi, Vietnam!

We are all together!

Lamees, the teacher in the classroom introduced the project during circle time while discussing the weather. We stopped and heard a bit of wind. I asked if they could hear it. We described it as the wind was crashing against the classroom. I told the children instead of using paint brushes, what else can they find in the garden and the first thing they went to was the trees. The colors of the week are green and yellow so we kept in with our theme. 

The children were asked to go out into the school grounds and have a look to see what materials they could use / find which are different to what we would normally use in the classroom environment. The children looked around and
brought back pegs, sticks, leaves, twigs from around the school property and instead of using normal powder paint they decided to use food colouring.

The children loved the new and different way of painting and had a ball with the different leaves and colors.  

My Toddler Class this morning decided that they also wanted to be included in the latest art project, so we let them experiment.  The children in the Toddler class range in age from 19 months to 3 years of age.

Regards,
Tayla 

The 3-6 year olds at Oakdale Montessori School in Cape Town, South Africa are making and sharing art with the Tigers, 4-5 year olds from Just Kids School in Hanoi, Vietnam.

The Music Moves the Tiger Cubs and the Puppies

WOW! What a great art project! The children absolutely loved this project and they produced some wonderful pieces that showed their thoughts and feelings from the music.

We started off this project by closing our eyes and listening to some music. I chose Simply Three's instrumental version of Avicii's Wake me up.

I chose this song because it has some clear layers of music that will attract different students. I also chose an instrumental song because English lyrics might be too difficult for us at this stage. 

After listening to the song once, i replayed it and we broke down all the different parts of the song. The beats, the high pitched violin and the deep base sounds and we started to draw on the whiteboard what we think those sounds looked like. 

A very popular response was spotting on the board to the beat, and doing swirls and waves to the melody.

What about the colour? What colour does it sound like? Blue? Green? Red??

Now it was our turn to paint! We had a range of medium to paint with. We had paintbrushes-thick and thin, chop sticks, cardboard toilet rolls, scrunched up paper and tissue.

Then the music started again and we were ready to go. The children were so eager, some starting with their spotty beats and others making rainbow waves. We had circles, we had lines, we had swirls and we even had some happy faces.

We played the music a number of times until all the children had finished their painting. Some even did 2 or 3 paintings, which are now proudly displayed in our classroom.

What a wonderful art project that the children really enjoyed.

Love as always to our friends in South Africa and Finland!
Teacher Steph, the Tiger Cubs and the Puppies.

The 4 year old Puppies from Just Kids in Hanoi, Vietnam are making and sharing art with the artist Tigers at Your School in Espoo, Finland.  The 4 year old Tigers at Just Kids are making and sharing art with the 3-6 year olds at Oakdale Montessori School in Cape Town, South Africa.

Below are photographs from the workshop with the Tiger Cubs.

Below are pictures from the workshop with the Puppies.

Magnifying our life!

Hi,

Today we had a great pattern workshop. I had big magnifying glasses and apparently it was the most exiting thing. I instructed kids about the patterns, and they made things that they had seen through the magnifying glasses. For texture making we used simple color pencils so they are not that flashy. Kids were happy about the masks so I let them have it for a day.

Tomorrow I am going to collect them and send to Estonia.

Best,
Kristina

Kristina Laine and her 4-5 year old artists at Kalinka Päiväkoti in Helsinki, Finland are making and sharing art with Evelyn Müürsepp and her 4-5 year old artists in Mooste Preschool in Mooste, Estonia.

What am I? Oh what could I be?

We first started the workshop by playing a riddle game.  This got our brains thinking about how can we tell things about an object without giving it away!  From there we went into the world of senses and on this adventure- it was all about taste!  We thought about what foods are local to Nordic countries and what foods are not.  It seems that most of Your School's artists love picking berries from the beautiful forests of Finland!  Can you guess what the Monkeys' and the Tigers' favorite foods are?

The Tigers are 4 year old artists at Your School in Espoo, Finland.  They are making and exchanging art with the Puppies, 4 year old artists at Just Kids School in Hanoi, Vietnam.

The Monkeys at Your School in Espoo, Finland are making and sharing art with the Full Moons from Moonstone Preschool in Philadelphia, PA.

The Tigers are pattern happy!

Thank you Puppies!  We OBVIOUSLY love our pattern masks you made us!

The Tigers are 4 year old artists at Your School in Espoo, Finland.  They are making and exchanging art with the Puppies, 4 year old artists at Just Kids School in Hanoi, Vietnam.

Masks from Moonstone show patterns from across the Atlantic!

The Monkeys in Finland were soooo happy to receive the masks from USA!  As you can see, they went straight to fun times with the artwork from their friends :).

The Full Moons from Moonstone Preschool in Philadelphia, PA are making and sharing art with the Monkeys at Your School in Espoo, Finland.

Guess what?! From Vietnam

What a fitting project for our little learners!

We are currently learning all about food in our classroom. The kids loved making these little books, we had more fun talking about our favourite foods!

It turns out, we are just like everybody else! Our favourite foods are pizza, cake, cookies, apples, oranges, bananas....

We haven't learned too much about tastes but we do know lots about colours and shapes! 
Some of us say pasta is a circle, because of the plate, some see the long pieces of pasta! What colour is bread? what shape is a salad?? Different perspectives come from different minds.

We even turned it into a guessing game, guessing what something long and yellow is... or something red, yellow and a triangle shape....What fun!
We are also starting to write, we learned lots about writing shapes, colours and the names of our favourite foods.

We hope that our friends in Finland and South Africa enjoy our game and we look forward to learning what your favourite foods are!

Lots of love from Vietnam,
Teacher Steph, the Tiger Cubs and the Puppies
 

The 4 year old Puppies from Just Kids in Hanoi, Vietnam are making and sharing art with the artist Tigers at Your School in Espoo, Finland.  The 4 year old Tigers at Just Kids are making and sharing art with the 3-6 year olds at Oakdale Montessori School in Cape Town, South Africa.

Below are artworks from the Tigers Cubs.

Below are artworks from Puppies.

Patterns to South Africa and Finland from Vietnam!

WOW! What an interesting project, we learned so much about ourselves and the world around us!

We started by looking around our classroom and noticing some repeated patterns around us. Particularly during the winter months, we can experiment with some interesting and wonderful patterns on our clothes.

Then we decided to go a little deeper, and we got some magnifying glasses and started looking at our skin. The wrinkles, the lines, the hairs. How interesting we are! What about our friends, what do their faces look like?? What happens when we pull funny faces?? when we raise our eyebrows??

Remembering what we saw, we got straight onto making our masks. we remembered the lines, the spots, the hairs and we made our masks with the patterns from our skin. But of course we had to add some colour! I hope our friends in Finland and our new friends in South Africa enjoy our masks!

Teacher Steph, the Tiger Cubs and the Puppies.

The 4 year old Puppies from Just Kids in Hanoi, Vietnam are making and sharing art with the artist Tigers at Your School in Espoo, Finland.  The 4 year old Tigers at Just Kids are making and sharing art with the 3-6 year olds at Oakdale Montessori School in Cape Town, South Africa.

Making shapes that move

After morning circle we looked at the works from our Helsinki friends, trying to understand what devices are depicted, how they move and what drives them. The kids got all excited to do their own vehicles. Everyone got a kit of 3 geometric shapes. We looked at them, named them and explored how can a rectangle be turned into a square, diamond into triangles and oval into half circles. The rule was that they can cut these shapes if they want (but only once and by halving them) and they can trade the shapes with their friends and add afterwards details with pens. Most of the kids started excitingly to work.

Markus: tank of Siim, it protects people from the baddies
Lauri: truck what carries miraculous sun sand
Ats: snowplough
Laas: one wheel train. for cat, ferret, mouse and birdies...
Matthias: horse pulls kings car
Mattias: tank what collects firewood for soldiers
Mona: crystal palace and princess bringing crystals
Eliise: estonian train, takes people from one place to another
Lotte-lisandra: flying car travelling to põlva (nearby town), my mummy waving to me because im going to buy her a bracelet
Henri: grandma and grandpa are taking post to avery usual castle
Ode: robot-butterfly is flying from blossom to blossom
Kar-kaarel: carbage truck what carries chocolate
Siim: cumputer tank what can be upgraded

best greetings,
evelyn

Evelyn Müürsepp and her 4-5 year old artists in Mooste Preschool in Mooste, Estonia are making and sharing art with Kristina Laine and her 4-5 year old artists at Kalinka Päiväkoti in Helsinki, Finland.

Patterns from South Africa!

All the children were introduced to the theme during circle time. My teachers explained to the children that our skin is made up of cells and that our finger prints are all different. The children were asked to describe what they can see on their skin and fingers. Some children mentioned that we have holes in our skin were the hair comes out, others mentioned that we have lines and creases on our hands and feet. We told the children that their hands and feet are unique and the children compared their hands with the person sitting next to them in the circle.

The teachers explained that we are going to decorate a mask using the patterns we see on our skin, hands and feet. The children decided to use ear buds, sponges and the back of paint brushes to try and make up the patterns. We used food colouring/dye for this exercise not paint.

On the back of each mask is the childrens name, date of birth and Pink for girls and Blue for boys.

Lots of fun was had by staff and the children – we cannot wait to start the next project. The parents have been informed about the initiative in our weekly newsletter and are very supportive of this fantastic idea.

Kind Regards,
Rebecca

The 3-6 year olds at Oakdale Montessori School in Cape Town, South Africa are making and sharing art with the Tigers, 4-5 year olds from Just Kids School in Hanoi, Vietnam.