Spring themed crafts made by First Grade
"If you do not find spring, you make it.", Odysseas Elytis
Is it possible to deal with spring in a time of a pandemic, with closed schools, restrictions and the unstable weather of March depicted in a well-known saying? And yet…it is!
Spring is the childhood of the year and it goes incredibly well with children.
On the first day of March - and while the students still went to school for lessons - a student, entering the classroom in the morning, did not say "Good morning" nor wished "Have a nice month", but approached the chair, offered his teacher a paper flower which he had made himself and exclaimed: "Teacher… spring is here!". It was a wish that had been heard for a long time, but it was more relevant than ever.
At the moment when everything around us weighs down and when from all colors we see only the gray, the coming of spring is the new beginning, that we all need and long for. This beginning was made from the paper flower of a six-year-old student and was enough to fill all the First Grade classrooms of our Primary School with spring paintings, crafts, colors, poems, readings, songs, videos and images.
Throughout March, our screens were filled with blooming almond trees, which, instead of white flowers, were decorated with popcorn and finger paints. Spaghetti in the shape of a bow came out of the kitchen cupboards, was painted and became lively butterflies and bees, flying carefree on paper-painted flowers.
In fact, all this beauty of reborn nature and the animals that live in it was transferred to our lessons. The practice of reading was done through poems and stories that praise the spring nature and our writing book was filled with spring themed sentences. And, somehow, even the background on the teacher's screen during the online lesson "blossomed" and the daily welcoming of the children to the online lesson became a spring song.
And all this… to confirm again what Elytis said: "What the swallows accuse you of is the spring you did not bring". The First Grade students of the Primary School tried and finally brought it!
