Arts
and Crafts with Belarusian Children
This article was written by Ella Rose West, author of the Selfish Mum parenting blog – Ella posts about all things travel, family and home related, and believes passionately in mums living life to the full!
So my best friend did a crazy thing
recently and volunteered to let 2 little girls from a village in Belarus stay
with her for 4 weeks. Why? I asked
her. Why not? she replied. And that’s
why I love her.
Let me explain about the girls. They’re
from a village in Belarus that is still suffering from the explosion and
subsequent radiation leak at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986. The
radiations is still present in the air they breathe back home, in their water
supply, and the ground they grow food in, so the villagers are generally very
ill, and also very poor. There are charities in many Western countries that
bring children across for a month to provide them with better nutrition that
helps boost their immune systems and can add years on to their lives. It’s
definitely worth checking out in Google!
Babysitting
the Kids
She’d asked me in advance whether I’d be
her “official” babysitter for the girls, meaning, could she get me CBR checked
by the charity so she could dump them on me at a moment’s notice. Great friend
– or glutton for punishment – I said yes.
And so that is how I ended up looking after
two little girls who barely spoke any English for an evening. Thank God for
Google Translate – we coped.
Our
Paintings
Ok, so it wasn’t a moment’s notice, she had
a work friend’s leaving meal (or something like that) planned in advance, so I
knew this day was coming. She’d told me they love to do arts and crafts
activities, and so I bought materials, and we made beautiful pictures of the
local skyline to take home as souvenirs of their time in the UK.
How
to Create the Painting
1. Start by using red paint and lots of
water. Do side to side strokes from the top of the page to about two-thirds of
the way down. Make sure the paint is a brighter, darker red at the top and
becomes paler as you move down the page.
2. Use blue paint and do the exact same
thing but from the bottom of your page working upwards to where the red paint
ends.
3. Find something circular to draw around
to mark the sun, and use a pencil to mark the outline. Colour in using yellow
paint.
4. Add some yellow strokes into the red sky
and blue sea, brighter nearer to the sun and fading out further away.
5. Add a couple of easy black birds in the
sky using black paint.
6. On black paper, draw some of your area’s
local landmarks. Cut the silhouettes out and stick them onto the painting.
Voila!