Christmas Workshops At School

Last week the three, four and five-year-old classes at my daughter's school got together for an hour in the afternoon to do arts and crafts loosely related to Christmas. They were divided up into seven groups and each sent to a different part of the school with a teacher and some volunteering parents to do a craft of some sort. One room was face painting; another was gluing tongue depressors together into Christmas ornaments; another was constructing bits for a big nativity scene; another was baking marzipan cookies. Somehow, my daughter's teacher's husband found me and has been following me on Flickr for several months. I've yet to determine if his discovery was related to our choice of school and luck of school teacher. His photostream is much more impressive than mine. Anyhow, Nora's teacher asked me if I could come and take some photographs of all the workshops. I was happy to volunteer.

The seven days and workshops. All the parental volunteering had been done while we were away in the US, but I'm glad I was able to float around between the workshops in my photographer role.

The school has some excellent murals and drawings of famous Spanish painters.

One workshop involved learning about leaves, pine cones, and rocks.

Here's the children are doing that craft we all did of gluing crumpled up colored tissue paper to make a fluffy cloud. Nora was actually assigned to another group, but she was so upset that I could be present and not by her side that the only thing that would console her was being in the workshop group her beloved teacher was running.

Fluffy!

Another was just coloring.

Which the volunteer mothers cut out for nativity characters.

Equilateral ornaments.

I went back the following day because it was Nora's turn to do the marzipan cookies.

Dough!

Egg whites go in the dough and the yolks are saved for brushing onto the cookies for glazing.

They had these adorable little child-sized rolling pins.

Cookie cutters. Nora specifically requested the hippo and the heart.

Then into the cafeteria oven for 15-20 minutes.

Cooling.

The finished cookies, four for each child, to take home to Mommy and Daddy.

It seemed like all the kids had a lot of fun, and the participating parents (about 20 mothers and 1 other father) seemed to enjoy their time too.