Investing in the neighborhood school

We send our children to Turkish schools here in our neighborhood. My oldest is in 1st grade and my middle girly is in preschool.  This choice was not an easy one but we are confident of the choice we have made and it was in no way made out of ignorance.

Here is the project we did together in class.
Lots more pics as you scroll down. ;)

Truth is many would say the Turkish school system is not working properly ...without getting into all that I would say that this journey of our kids education overseas has probably been one of the harder issues we have faced as a family living overseas.  In it all we have done something that was somewhat unexpected, we have united with our neighbors we have felt the struggle and the real concerns for their children, we have been learners and are walking along side them as we too struggle through helping our kids get the best education. We do not feel that our children are getting a poor education, yes we have to be involved a lot with our 1st grader but our kids are succeeding, bilingual and doing well and we are so grateful for that. 

A little twist to it all, is we not only send our children to the public Turkish schools, but I also homeschool my kids in English and eventually a few other subjects along the way. Still trying to juggle that. :)
While we are here we take one year at a time regarding our kids education. We want to be sensitive to our kids educational progress as well as emotional and spiritual needs, so one year at a time we press on. 

Meanwhile to get my foot in the door and to promote Turkish creativitiy I asked my oldest daughter's teacher if I could come in and do a craft with the kids. I was readily given permission and now myself and two or three other moms go in every other Wednesday for the last hour of the day and do an educational craft.  The moms and children are both very excited and the response has been inspiring. 

I love that I am closer to my daughter, her friends and her atmoshpere at school. My daughter is very much a visual learner and I am so glad to be able to give a little bit of that to her in her public school setting.  An added bonus of course is that I am giving into my community.
Here are a few pics of the craft we did 2 weeks ago.
The next one is this week and I am goimg to share about Pointallism a bit and show pictures of different art forms and then do the q-tip art from this post.

It started out with TP rolls. I mean really doesn't every good craft need a TP roll.
Can you imagine I had enough rolls for everyone in the class..
I am a compulsive tp hoarder.
(a moment of confession)

Here is Autty helping get things ready.

Here I am giving it my best in Turkish to explain nocturnal and some of the different animals that are nocturnal.
I taught the names of the animals in English and Turkish.

I had a captive audience for the first 6 or 7 minutes.

Here are some of the students holding up their owls.

Here is the owl in it's natural habitat.

Unfortunatley Autumn was sick and couldn't come. ;(
I was sad that she was unable to be there.
However she will be there this week and I am sure 'help' me out with my Turkish. ;)

  I have been praying almost daily that I could find a way to use my creativity to invest in others and

 this has been a pure delight and one way to do that.  All the children call me Rebecca Teyze (which is Aunt Rebecca) and I love hearing it so many times.

 Click here to see this same project we did at home a few months ago.

~becky

Investing in the Turkish Neighbourhood School  Series #2  #3  #4
Click on number to visit the posts. 

Paper Marbaling with shaving cream!!



As I wrote about in my last post we were able to experience EBRU or paper Marbaling first hand last weekend at a Health Muesum in our city. It wa so very fun for all of us.




REACH lil ones REACH. :)
(This is a foutain that was put in the center of this Hospital
 because they believed the hearing of water
 helped to calm and relax the sick.)

 


Well when we got home I kept thinking about how to have the girls give this form of art a try. So many of us are visual or kinistatic learners so I wanted to help the concept stick and good ole shaving cream seemed to be what we needed for that to happen. 

Here is what we came up with. Enjoy and give it a try. YOu might want to make sure that Dad has had his recent shave however! ;). I got the idea of shaving cream from here.

Enjoy the pics..

 

What we used:
Pans, shaving cream, paint, and something to swirl the paint and paper
Oh yeah and a wet towel to clean up the mess! (it is a mild mess however) ;)



Making the design and adding colors.

We placed the paper carefully on the top of the shaving cream..

and then when we took the paper off the top of the shaving cream
 and scraped off the excess and...

tada our own Paper marbaling.

This whole project took only about 30 minutes and 5 pieces of art were designed.

These are the top 3. :)

  

A beautiful piece of art! 
(Oh what to do with all my kiddos beautiful pieces of art. ;),
 and mind you it is beautiufl and so it must be displayed somewhere and everywhere! :))



I recently found out that they have paper marabling classes you can take here in my city and I thought that would be an amazing thing to try.  It would be even cooler if you oldest and I could do it together?  Wouldn't that be super.

Enjoy and off I go to bed. Oh how I love crawling into bed when I am so very tired and tonight is one of those nights that I am oh so very tired. Good night from the 'Far west corner' of Turkey.
                                                                                                                            ~becky
     

I linked this craft project over at:
Mommas kinda crafty 
Jump on over and check out other fun ideas. :)                                                                                                                             

Simply Beautiful ~ EBRU

Beauty is simplicity to me. 

I love the simple things in life. 

I especially love color in all it's ranges. 

This post is celebrating the beauty of Turkish Creativity. 

Enjoy the color.. and enjoy Turkey for a moment too.

This last weekend we as a family went to a Muesum here in our city and there is a husband and his wife who do traditional Turkish art called paper marbling or in Turkish EBRU.  I have included pictures to record how fasinating and beautfiul it is.  Everything they use is natural and each piece is unique, no two pictures are the same. 

EBRU (marbling paper): is the art of transferring the patterns prepared on the surface of the water to a sheet of paper.

The girls are so interested and I love that they were able to sit so close and watch everything.

Here he is flicking differnt colors of paint unto the surface of the prepared water.

He uses differnt tolls, like a scredriver to move the colors around.

Tulips originated from Turkey. Tulips are literally everywhere in the spring here.
Usually the paintings are of differnt colors of tulips.

This is just a normal piece of paper where the image will be transferred onto.

Simply Beautiful!

Autty gave this gentlemen a flower (weed) she had picked so he gave her his demenstration picture.

What a great gift for her. It is very fitting since she herself is a rainbow of colors and creativity.

If you can see there are lots of paintings in the background done by him, his wife and daughter.
The pictures range from 10 lira to 60 lira.  They are amazing.

These are both demenstration pictures, they end up selling the demenstration ones for just 10 liras.

(About 7 U.S. dollars)

The more expensive ones are flawless and have an amazing range of color and detail. I would like to go back and buy one but these two are for the girls for now. The experience was an absolute joy.

When we got home I kept thinking about how we too could try marabling,  we ended up with some fun prints of our own...but that is for next time. :)

Update:  

Paper marbling with shaving cream. Check out our experiment at home with paper marbling. 

It was a lot of fun.

Click  here to visit our marabling with shaving cream post.

 I have been considering doing a GIVE AWAY based on 'Celebrating Turkish Creativity'.  I thought these paintings might be a good option.

Tell me what you think? 

 I would love to know if others would want an origanl Paper Marbaling piece of their own from Turkey?

Pointallism painting with q-tips

Today I am featuring my sweet daughter. 

We are learning about different forms of art and so I wanted Autty to share her project about pointallism or dot painting with you. I think she a fabulous job and did great with detail.

  Enjoy. :)

(fun thing about Turkey is all the fairy boat rides) 

Hi again it is me Autumn. 

I like to do pointallism painting, so here is a picture that I did.  

You can try it too it is very fun and super easy. 

This is what you use for this project.  It is called pointallism painting.  
Pointallism is dot painting.

I used this paint for my picture.

Every part needs to be dot dot dot.

This is me doing my picture with the q-tips.

This is the picture I made.    


Thanks for looking. ~ Autumn

Thanks again Mom for letting me use your blog. (he he he he)

You can also check out Autty's other project here.


Also George Seurat is a famous pointillism painter, who developed the technique. His famous painting Sunday Afternoon On the Island of La Grands Jatte took him 2 years to paint and is comprised of millions of dots to form the picute. It is spectacular.

Hey fun idea: leave a comment for Autumn and tell her what you think her picture is of.

We recently were able to go and see marbaling paper done. (Ebru in Turkish)

It was fascinating and we will post on that this week too and how the kids did their own. Here is the post on Ebru: simply beautiful Ebru - marble painting

Here is an updated post I did on Pointillism painting at the local Turkish School that my girls attend. Hope you enjoy the pics and cultural twists. :) Investing in the Neighborhood School #2 

In our west corner.
Becky

fabric & jars endless possibilities!!

I love color and fabric has a way of helping me enjoy color. 

 I also have this thing "USE WHAT YOU HAVE' and I 'have' lots of glass jars and I am always trying to find a fun way to use them for storage.

 I am so happy about my new found colorful storage option.

 I saw my dear dear friend (who is fabric lover herself) do this but I think she sewed them and well I just wanted an easy peasey way of covering them.

This project is simple and totally me.

A tad boring..
however I do think that no button jar can be boring with all those colors.

I used double sided tape for this project.

1,2,3,4!  I love simplicity.

These make me smile and I can take the lids on and off with ease.
I would add though that if I didn't get just the right size of tape then it was sticky (my green lid is that way).

I have thought about sewing a bunch of lid covers with elastic
but this is so simple I have a feeling that will not be happening any time soon.

I have a few fabric/sewing projects I am really wanting to do but time is not on my side and I figure if investing in others is what is keeping me from doing the fun things I like to do then I choose to wait.

Lord give me your heart to choose others over myself and provide windows of opportunity for me release all this crazy pent up artistic creativity.

feeling rather chatty this evening...;)
~becky

diy Patchwork bookmarks ~by my girlies

Happy Spring... I am happy that the day on the calendar has arrived but really when the weather finally turns then I will really be able to say Happy Spring to all. 

 However in light of the seasons changing which I absolutely love

 we have been doing a few fun projects ..especially with fabric scraps.  

We worked on these 'patchwork' bookmarks the other day for a B-day present for the kid's Grandpa.  

The thing I like about this idea is it gave my girls the opportunity to touch the fabric and put colors together.

  It was a lot of fun and easy to do. 

 I used up some scrap fabric but I think if you had some really chick new stuff these could be a real hit!!

Patchwork bookmarks made by my girls.  
I think a new or used book and a book mark is one of the best gifts! 


If your interested here is how we went about it. :)

I tend to do almost everything "with" my kiddos and so while
the little guy was playing cars we were cutting up fabric.
 However in this pic I guess he was more interested in his 'bear bear' and the fabric. 
It's amazing we caught him holding still. ;) 

I absolutely love this picture of my girls hands
reaching for the colorful fabric.

We just used pieces of scrapbook paper I had
and a glue sick  to put the fabric on.

My little Lydia took this pic.  ;)

We wanted to monogram the bookmarks to make them more personal.
Plus I just love monogramming..;)

I think stitching on paper is fun so I decided to give Autty a go at it.
She was a natural on the sewing machine and tonight we practiced again.
It is fun to work with her on something she really desires to do, funny thing is she will probably pass me up if she keeps learning at this rate. ;)

Here is the back of them. 
 I didn't want to cover up the back because I wanted to leave room for a written note.
As you can see one is for one of the Grandmas. :)

They are done except for being laminated and some ribbon.
I did leave a few with no stitching just for variety.

Here we are at the Kirtasiye (office supply store) getting them laminated.

For all you Turkey dwellers several Kirtasiyes have lamination machines and it is inexpensive.

 Yep that's the lamination machine. I don't know why I took the pic authenticity, I guess. ?? ;)
 It cost about 2 liras for one page. (just over a dollar)

Here they are laminated.
 I cut them up and then rounded the corners so they weren't so poky. 

I put a slit in the center top and found a pretty ribbon for each

 and then hand sewed the ribbon together.

This little picture is a token for my girlie's. 

I have a few more 'no sew fabric projects' I want to post.  Fabric is one of my favorite things and this last weekend our family went to Istanbul for an education conference and I was able to buy a few cotton pieces of fabric.(cotton is really hard to find and pretty expensive) I am thrilled and completely inspired ~ inspiration is not usually my issue for not getting more done, it is time. I figure God allots 24 hours for a reason so I guess I will submit to it and go to bed. :) 

Good night from the west corner.

~becky