Marijana Kolarić, a primary school teacher at the Petefi brigada Elementary School in Kula and one of the Best Educators in Serbia for 2016, designs various projects, creative workshops, and humanitarian events with each generation of students.
At the end of each school year, in the school hall, we make exhibitions of our artworks, projects, and this year we also included creative reading diaries. Besides that, we show diplomas, certificates, certificates of appreciation that we collect during that school year. We invite to the exhibition all students and employees of the school, parents, grandparents, and other citizens who want to support our event. Our exhibition will always be humanitarian. Therefore, the last ticket was a plastic cap as we are implementing the humanitarian action "Stopper to a smile" at our school. While our visitors toured the exhibition, the students put together pictures from the collected plastic caps and had fun. In addition to the humanitarian work, we also collected donations to buy the necessary materials and accessories for our next project activity and participation in the city event Pumpkin Days, which is held in October.
Pumpkin Days in Kula
The Women Entrepreneurs' Association "Eko Kula" is organizing the seventh Autumn Festival called Pumpkin Days. This year, my students - Teacher Maja's Butterflies, their parents, my older students, and I decided to participate in the event with creative decorative items from our small workshop. With the money we collected at the exhibition, we bought the necessary material. The parents of the students helped us with decorations, bows, materials, jars, and cakes. Additionally, they spared their time to help us make decorative items that we sold at the city event.
So the students and I made the plan to realize more activities on the event Pumpkin Days:
1. Creative workshop and product sale for decorating our classroom;
2. Fundraising activity for the treatment of a girl from the city and
3. Promotion of the Day of Intelligence and the Japanese game Go through a creative autumn workshop and playroom in front of our sales stand, entitled "Play Go, Tic-tac-toe, make rockets, play child!"
Creative workshop and product sale for decorating our classroom
Through the conversation about autumn and its features, and as we talked about the name of the event we participated in, we decided to make decorative pumpkins from fabric and decorative scarecrows from decorative jars, sacks, and raffia in our creative workshop. We also designed a book of recipes for pumpkin pies, which we printed in color, plasticized, cut, and tied with a bow.
Every day at the project classes, section, homeroom class, and free activities, we sewed pumpkins and made scarecrows. I taught the students how to put the thread in the needle, how to tie a knot, and then to sew the fabric. After sewing, they had the task of filling their colorful pumpkin with a material called Koflin (thermal wadding) which is used for filling toys, decorative pillows, jackets, etc. They used decorative twine to tighten the pumpkins and eventually decorated them with bows, wooden flowers, and pearls. They came across various materials, natural and artificial, which will make it easier for them to better understand the school subject Nature and society. Every day a group of parents came to help us make as many products for sale as possible. Also, the students' mothers made us pumpkin cakes, which, in addition to our decorative items, we sold at the Pumpkin Days on October 16, 2021.
Humanitarian action "Our little means a lot to someone"
Since we are the philanthropist department and part of the humanitarian project of the Ana and Vlade Divac Foundation, we thought of adding a humanitarian character to our activities, sales stand, and the usual creative workshop and playroom. All the humanitarian activities of my students within every generation are called "Our little means a lot to someone." This time, we decided to collect donations for the treatment of a sick girl from our city. We made an autumn frame with the features of the event, and anyone who wanted to make a financial contribution could take a picture using our framework. We managed to raise money. The students are very proud because they did a good deed, and, as I teach them, left an endowment for which their generation and they personally will be remembered as benefactors, philanthropists.
WE PLAY GO, TIC-TAC-TOE, WE MAKE ROCKETS, PLAY A CHILD!
Promotion of the Day of Intelligence and the Japanese strategic game Go through a creative autumn workshop and playroom in front of our sales stand
The third activity was the promotion of Intelligence Day, playing the Japanese strategic game Go, which could be played by both young and old. They also played Tic-Tac-Toe with unusual figurines, butterflies, stars, flowers, etc. In front of our sales and humanitarian stand, we set up small tables and seats made of straw bales on which sat the children participating in the workshop and playroom, but also their parents. The youngest had the opportunity to make a rocket with paper. Then, they could put it on a straw and fire it by blowing through the straw hard as possible and as far as they could. At the event, students could also play games such as Nine Men's Morris, Don't Get Angry Man, shooting targets with apples, jumping in sacks, playing in straw, etc.
Our visitors, my students, their parents, and I were very content and happy. We sold all student products from the creative workshop at the Pumpkin Days. With the money raised, we will decorate our classroom and create a relaxing and pleasant environment in which students will be happy to stay and acquire knowledge, skills, and habits.
A video of the activities can be found here.