One of the things a school loves to give out are projects - whether it is for fancy dress, classroom charts, art exhibition projects and what not, there are a lot of creative assignments that come our way. The easiest would be for us to just do it ourselves and send the whole thing with our little ones. After all, art work can be long and tedious and kids can be messy and get bored easily.
What I like about Anoushka's school is that they there is always a lot of lead time when it comes to creative projects - usually a minimum of 3 weeks if not more. It gives me all the time in the world to settle on ideas and then manage to get Anoushka involved in making it as well. Here is a look at some of the projects we worked on together.
In Junior 1 or Upper KG, she had to participate in a fancy dress competition. As I normally do, I got online, and showed her a couple of fancy dress images online. She took a shine to the Egyptian queen. And so we got down to it. I had the white gown part stitched with a local tailor - the rest was all hand work. We picked up all that we needed at Itsy Bitsy in Banashankari. Once we marked out the red chart and cut it to shape, we handed it to her and taught her how to place the golden ribbon and stick it down. Without doubt we had a huge mess on our hands and it took around a week to get through it all, but by the end of it, all the dirty work, was literally done by her.
Her headgear was beaded. I punched the holes into the crown and taught her to measure and cut the string and tie it into the holes. Next I told her to bead the string any which way she wanted. I helped her tie of the edges. The outfit turned out great in the end and when the judges pulled her aside to ask her about the costume and how it was made, she was able to tell them all that she had done. She did win a prize for this and well deserved it.
In Nursery or Lower KG, she wanted to be a dalmation puppy. Once we had all the white clothing we needed, it was the task of painting on the black circles. I marked out the circles for her, stuffed the shirt and tights with paper so nothing seeped through and she spent the next 10 days or so painting one circle at a time. Even the cap is her work. It was a "woof"tiful effort by her. The trick was to let her be every time she got bored with, which was usually 15 minutes later.
Then Anoushka went through this phase where she volunteered to make charts at school for her class. So much so that when I went to the school for a PTA meeting the teacher apologized saying that Anoushka was so enthusiastic about it she did not want to say no and that she was not sure what kind of schedule I kept to be able to work on these. That's when I told her not to worry at all, all the work is done by Anoushka under my supervision, so if she asks for her, let her know that she is responsible to get the work done. The first chart was on kinds of animals and the second on kinds of plants - these went up on the wall over a year ago now and that's why these photos look as bad. But in both cases, she chose the photos online, she cut them out once printed, and stuck them in the boxes I marked out. I showed her how to do the border on one and she did the rest. I left the color combinations up to her.
By the time we were done with these two charts, she brought home another assignment - that of making a chart on the life of Chacha Nehru which had to have a small note on him as well. I wish I had the photo for that one, but I don't. I wrote the whole note for her in pencil and asked her to write over it but the catch was that she had to read the word first before she wrote over it. This time round, I didn't have to bother with placements and sticking, she did that all on her own. Same with the borders that I made her do, she chose the color and the pattern. Got her to read and do art work - BooYaa!
And for the December holidays this year she was given the task of creating an underwater scene in a shoe box. Good thing we were going to Mangalore - I was conned into buying a new pair of shoes to get the box, since an existing shoe box did not cut it for Mademoiselle Artist. We had strict instructions from the school that everything had to painted, cut and drawn and colored on with chart paper. So she painted the background blue and I helped bind the box. Next we stuck on glass paper to give it that deep blue hue. Sudhakar is great with the cartoon faces and so he did that - she cut out, colored and stuck everything in place. Bubbles she did with silver glue. When we went to the beach, she collected sand and shells and used that as well. This was one project, where she actually came up ideas on her own - she wanted to fix in small pillars and balance the lid over it with fish hanging down so it would look a slice of the ocean.
