Our love for animals moved us to borrow the  museum kit  “Painting an animal” from the “Museum of Greek Children’s Art”. Our daily program was enriched with pieces of art and kids were happy to approach the animal kingdom with different ways. We even installed an outdoor museum in our Erasmus+ corner  with free etrance to … parents!

The museum kit gave us also a perfect chance to meet our friends in the 1o Primary School Voulas . We arranged an appointment with our colleagues of the 1st grade , Spyridoula Kiskira and Gogo Riga and we visited their schoolyard . All the kids were happy to look at the different paintings  and to play games inspired by various animals. We spent a joyful morning travelling with our precious museum kit!

This year all week before Father`s Day on 11th of November we celebrated  it in our kindergarten. Some groups made celebration like a concert, some groups took a trip to the museum with fathers, one group made event like a yoga training.  Erasmus+ groups decided get more attention to outdoor education and  we  made the evening  adventurous  with sports-games and various tasks for children and their dads on huge territory around kindergarten. Later we had a picnic with snacks made by children. One group baked pancakes straight in the cold November rain.  It was an evening full of excitement, great team-work between fathers and children and adventurous outdoor experience. Teachers were happy for fine partnership with parents.

From September to November parents and grandparents helped 40 middle-class kindergarten children and 30 large group children made musical instruments from recyclable materials and material from nature: drums in metal or cartoons, balloons and yarns of elastic, trumpets from cartoon tubes, plastic glasses, coloured wire and buttons, shoe box guitars, elastic yarns and coloured paper, plastic boxes filled with rice, clipped between two plastic spoons.

Blessed and proud of what they did, they went out into the yard of the kindergarten and held a real concert to complete the musical collection.

An article issued in the last Marly le Roi’s local magazine (October 2018) relating the visit of the european teachers to our school last June during which they went around the different classrooms, observed the artistic work in progress and saw the pupils at work.

During the visit, the pupils have introduced themselves and sang in english and finally, during a diner party in the school yard, all the french teachers and the european partners had exchange their different views on pedagogical and personnal matters.

On Friday 2nd of November 2018 we had the honor and the joy to welcome at our school the artist Martha Dimitropoulou. With studies in Athens School of Fine Arts, in London Royal College of Art and in Fine Arts of University of East London, and also with many honors and awards in solo shows and group exhibitions in Greece and abroad, she is a visual artist who uses the pine needle as a unit repeated with the same steadiness with which one would choose to make a sculpture of clay or plaster. She shared with us her love about pine needles, material which is neglected by nature, and organized with us and our students a unique workshop! We created castles of pine needles, inspired by the cheerful sand castles that kids make by the sea, combined at the end in a final sculpture, a synthesis of all the small ones, named “The Castle of our Fantasy!” Thank you dear Martha Dimitropoulou for this beautiful day!

In autumn in our playground we have plenty of dead leaves. Pupils like to play with them, but we wanted to give them a second life and teach the children how to take care of their environment.
Some teachers have compost bin in their own building and pupils were very excited to pick up the dried leaves and put them into a bag. Many of them were active helping the teachers.
Meanwhile, they could hear the sounds of the crispy dried leaves and the strong smell of the leaves. Children were very active and they collected more than 4 bags of leaves. Then the leaves were put on a special side waiting to be added to organic’s waste.

In October, 26 pupils aged 5 years old had a bingo game on letters outside the classroom. The teacher gave the name of a letter and pupils had to find it on a small board. They could experiment the pleasure to learn outside in the sun. Their teacher noticed they were quieter and more concentrated on their activity.

As we keep on studying animals with endless enthusiasm we decided to create few arts and crafts using different materials. Cartons, oil crayons, play-doh, colourful wires and pine cones from the pine tree of our garden have been transformed into hedgehogs and cute little mice. Look at them : they love our school and our Erasmus+ program!

On Thursday 18th of October the teachers Maria Cristina Cella and Elena Vermi together with their pupils of Besurica Preprimary school went to Don Minzoni Primary school to meet the pupils of 3rd grade and their teacher Barbara Ferrari, in order to make in common a series of activities in the outdoors according to our Erasmus+ project. Before that we had worked about the parts of tree and we had also read “The very hungry caterpillar” (Eric Carle), because the pupils like to search in the garden for little bugs. During our walk we have collected as usual a lot of materials for studying later in the classroom.

Another mother volunteer came to our school to teach the kids how to make a tasty and healthy sweet using seasonal fruits. The whole procedure took place under the sky where junior chefs got involved in every step: they washed the fruits, they carried all the tools, they cut fruits into small pieces, they smashed ingredients to prepare a crunchy dough and of course they ate all that tasty “fruit soufflé”! Congratulations dear mom; you became a great Erasmus+ volunteer!