Oh Christmas Tree!

 

The Mairtown Kindergarten year is coming closer to its end, and that always means very special events are just around the corner – Christmas and the Summer holidays!!

This is a time of anticipation and planning for our special year’s end traditions. One of these is decorating a Christmas Tree for the Christmas Tree festival at St John’s (Golden) Church. For some years now our tamariki have created beautiful decorations with a sustainability theme to adorn our Mairtown Kindergarten tree. To create our decorations, we use a variety of recycled, reused, and natural resources, a diverse range of materials which inspire creativity and promote sustainability. We begin by reviewing our collection of previous years decorations. What do we want to retain and reuse for this year? What can we deconstruct in order to create repurposed fresh decorations? What has lived its life and needs to be retired to refuse now?

Then it is time to put our thinking caps on, and have a search in our favourite environments, our kindergarten, the beach and the ngahere - what resources and gifts of Papatūānuku, Tangaroa and Tanemahuta could we celebrate and add to our collection this year? 

The ultimate goal of environmental education is to develop good habits both in and beyond the classroom, so that as children grow, they do not think of themselves as making a special effort or taking an extra step beyond their normal activities to be “green.” Instead, the discipline of sustainable practice is integrated deeply into their sense of care for the physical environment as a life practice.

Jensen (2023)

A great example of the beauty and imagination tamariki express in this way, is the creation of our Christmas ‘peg-doll’ fairies.

This process began with finding our old fairies from previous years and deconstructing them. We were left with a wonderful collection of trimmed fabric pieces and a selection of reusable trimmings, along with a collection of clean wooden pegs ready to be reimagined as beautiful 2023 fairies. We added leaves and leaves and lichen found in our ngahere, donated fabrics, lace, and trimmings, giving our tamariki lots of choices in creating their own special fairy design.

Creativity is not the finding of a thing, but the making something out of it after it is found                                 (James Russell Lowell)

The process of creating a peg-doll fairy requires lots of patience; from waiting for your turn to come, to then focusing on each step  - choosing materials, visualising how these materials could be combined to construct a fairy who expresses your unique design, and carefully engaging with the tools and techniques in order to make your vision a reality. Over two days, tamariki who chose to participate selected the resources which were special to each of them and used them to turn our container of bare pegs into a new collection of  beautiful Christmas fairies.

 We also put our new clay stamps to good use in creating a new range of ornaments, the pressed clay patterns then being further adorned with individual designs, and the clay then dried and sealed with a blend of  PVA glue and gold paint to finish them off.

Our stunning tree is now proudly in place and waiting for visitors at the Christmas Tree Festival. I hope you will have the opportunity to go and take a look with your whānau. It is a lovely way to learn a little more about the organisations within our community, and maybe the trees on display will inspire a few ideas for your own decorations at home too!        

                                                             

   Meri Kirihimete, Anne Bawden, December, 2023

When we are creative, we can develop meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, and interpretations. Creativity is risking what is for what could be. Childspace.