Guest Post: Arts and Crafts with Belarusian Children

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!