Mail Art + Pen Friends = Dear You Art Project
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's a great idea and kids are natural pattern creators. One thing confused them though- namely magnifying classes, I should have left these out and just focused on patterns we can see with our eyes. Otherwise it is too much information packed in 1 project: patterns and magnification and ones skin and masks. Otherwise kids really loved their masks and did not want to send them away, but when i reminded them that they get masks in return from other kids in Finland they agreed.
So cant wait untilyour masks arrive.
Best greets,
Evelyn
Evelyn Müürsepp and her 5-7 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The first impression pupils had on this task was "creepy". Observing their own skin was not so interesting for them. Finally they choose to take this project with eager minds :) They are very curious about their new Canadian friends. I let them to see and read the letters we have received this far.
A few did masks using different materials. Many borrowed faces or part of somebody else´s face using the magazine photos. They enjoyed playing with the Mac photobooth.
Br,
Päivi Huhtinen
Päivi Huhtinen and her group of 5th graders from The English School in Helsinki, Finland are making and sharing art with Kaarina Losey and her 6th graders at Pioneer Park P.S. in Ontario, Canada.
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.
It was fun! The kids made wonderful vehicles. I think they were very eager about it. We used color paper, glue, scissors and pencils.
Many kids adapted the task to their ideas about what kind of vehicles they would like to make. There was even a human character- vehicle and a sweet princess carriage :). Some kids followed the instructions, while others improvised. I had a book about all kinds of transport and I showed it to everybody.
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?! How can that be? Where did that come from?
Things started to look very different when put under the lens. The Tigers were explorers and made art inspired from their explorations. The world may look different after some close inspection : ).
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.
Our exploration with the magnifying glasses brought us to closer to what is around us! Can you figure out where the Monkeys found their inspiration for their masks?
The Monkeys at Your School in Espoo, Finland are making and sharing art with the Full Moons from Moonstone Preschool in Philadelphia, PA.
What a wonderful imagination all the Monkeys at Your School have! From simple shapes, they all came up with vehicles that could glide, fly, drive over all kinds of terrain.
J made a magic creature that can take you anywhere you want to. You just have to hop in and write where you want to go and then pull.
M's vehicle has a chimney. It's name is One Wheel and it can fly.
N's submarine can go upside down!
M thought a sea monster could be a fun new machine to ride.
W's vehicle is operated by a Snow Man. It can travel anywhere you want to- even on air, ground, and water!
N's camper van can fly because there is a motor. There are symbols for the driver to push. E=engine. S=snola. G=gas. M=motor.
I think it's true when E says, "Nobody in the world has ever seen this vehicle before! Because it's imaginary. It has oval shaped wings and a lot of buttons."
The Monkeys always have loads of questions from their Moonstone friends in Philadelphia, USA.
How hot is it there?
Are they having fun?
What do they like to do?
"We all love receiving your artwork and we hope you like our things too!"
With love,
Arlene and The Monkeys
The 5-6 year old Monkeys from Your School in Espoo, Finland are making and exchanging art with the 5 year old Full Moons from Moonstone Preschool in Philadelphia, USA.
