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.

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.

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.

Yay! The Tiger Cubs and Puppies received a package from Finland!

Look what came today! The kids were very excited to check it all out! And were very intrigued with their inventions!

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 is starting a new friendship with the K1 artists at International School of Helsinki in Helsinki, Finland. Exciting!!

Moi Moi Tiger Cubs!

We had the wonderful time Skyping with our friends, Tiger Cubs, in Vietnam. Last month they had made some imaginary friend puppets and posted them to us. The children really engaged in the skype call, thinking of excellent questions to ask their new friends:

A asked, ‘What are your names? Do you like candy?’
Aa asked, ‘Where do you live?’
Dsri asked, ‘Is it hot in Vietnam?’
J asked, ‘Do you play spiderman games?’
W asked, ‘Do you like cake?’ (To this they answered ‘YEEEAAAAHH! we love cake’)
F asked, ‘We have kind and helpful hands, do you?’

They asked us how we say hello in Finnish and what the weather was like here today.  We found out that it's warm in Vietnam! And that it's afternoon in Hanoi whereas it was morning in Helsinki. What?! Wow!

Dsri told them that the leaves were falling here so we showed them what it looks like outside of our window. K and A explained how to play the police game. It seems that the Tiger Cubs also like to play the police game! They wondered if we like the minions and told us what they would be dressing up as for halloween! We realised that we have so much in common :).

Soon it will be Halloween! We talked about what we will dress up as. We can't wait to see your costumes, Tiger Cubs!

With love,
K1, Arlene, Lydia, and Bibiana