Dwarf workshop
Text and photos: Anca Zinculescu
It was with joy and excitement that we stepped into the room where our first workshop together was to take place. With the help of Ana and her father, we set up the tables for our creative activity and welcomed our other friends.
We started by getting to know each other and continued with discovering our little fingers through song. We found out that the thumb is very walkable, the forefinger needs a cane, the middle finger is cold and wears a coat, the ring finger is very industrious and carries a suitcase, and the little one... well, the little one doesn't carry anything :)... precisely because it's little. The children also enjoyed setting the tone for the song and clapping at the end.
Since the curiosity was very high, I didn't linger any longer and moved on to the creative work, the special autumn edition. Because we're sorry to see the poor little dandelions run out of leaves, we decided to glue them back on. So, with the help of their parents, the children created wonderful and original autumn pictures with freshly picked leaves. The leaves were some small, some big, some yellow, some rusty and some red. At the end, the children added animal stickers to their paintings and signed their names with stamps.We continued our workshop by meeting a very special elephant, a multicoloured elephant called Elmer. Elmer is a very funny and playful elephant. However, Elmer is the only elephant in the jungle that doesn't have the grey colour of elephants and this makes him sad. As a result, Elmer decides to change his colour and goes on an adventure through the jungle. The children had the opportunity to recognise many colours and many of the animals in the jungle. The continuation of Elmer's story will be told next week.Elmer's story was followed by song and dance. We all joined in, from small to large, and had a great time. We hopped like frogs, hopped like bunnies, walked like midgets and clapped our hands with great glee.
We said goodbye reluctantly, but with joy that we had spent a very nice hour together. See you next Saturday!
Romanian language and culture
Text and photos: Eliza van Peppen
The star of the lesson on 17 November was "Anger" (actually defined as a second emotion, based on the main emotion of grief, disappointment, sadness). This second emotion, often gives us a hard time and even more so our children.
Along the lines of the therapeutic reading "The Tale of the Tortoise", I experienced Tobias' experiences and emotions. In short, Tobias is a friendly and clever frog who gets angry at his friends because they don't want to play the game he suggests. Angry at the other frogs he decides they are no longer his friends and wants revenge. On the way, after a surprise meeting with a wise character, he understands that he was wrong, that it is important to find solutions together with friends and not to take revenge on them.
How many times have we not heard our children crying or having the same experience? With questions like "What started the fight? Why was Tobias angry? How could he have done otherwise? What about you, have you been angry in what situations? we defined 'anger', 'upset' and understood, I hope, how to proceed in a similar situation. We've also renewed our vocabulary with words like "disappointment, sulking, pouting, bombastic, wise, rude". These were discussed and explained. One suggestion would be to take them home and put them in different contexts. With repetition and you, the children will retain and use them in the future.
We role-played and took turns expressing/acknowledging our emotions: joy, sadness, disappointment, fear.
Do you get angry sometimes? And if so, what do you do? Children learn to manage anger in this lesson. How? By playing the breathing game: 3 times breathe, breathe, breathe. First, deep and bring the air to the belly, at the same time the thought follows the breath and the hand feels the belly. A useful "time out" and self-recovery exercise.
Our lesson ended with a creative moment where we put our imaginations to work and created masks representing anger.
Play, personal development and photography
Text and photos by Raluca Tudorache
Last Saturday, several of us in number, after warming up with a couple of servings of hot chocolate, went outside in search of photo-vocabularies.
We quickly went through the alphabet and rehearsed the things we discovered a lesson ago, then continued on trying to finish exploring the alphabet, new words and even expressions, and the gorgeous landscape of late Dutch autumn.
Despite the fresh air, the colours and the great light, the cold was real so the vocabulary seemed to have skimmed too. Therefore, we went back inside the school walls for a second round of hot chocolate and a round of FAZAN, so our vocabulary warmed up and came alive again.
The fantastic colours and the sunset were an inspiration for me too, so I took some artistic portraits with a Canon 7D camera, wanting to give the children some exemplary images and at the same time pleasant memories.At our next workshop the children, under my guidance, will be encouraged to prepare decorations for St. Nicholas along with a little personal invention: we will learn how to compose a "love" letter to parents.
Yesterday was Thanks Giving Day, and although it's an American holiday we hear about from friends or only in movies, it inspired me personally to meditate on the things I myself am thankful for. I think it's a wonderful reason, and I find it at least a good exercise to remind or teach children to become aware of the love they receive, even if it's unconditional. It is important that they learn to express their feelings more easily and show gratitude.
