Kindergarten "Child's Friend" - BULGARIA

15 September !

The school year in Bulgaria starts on the 15th of September.

Although Kindergartens usually work from the beginning of September, we had our festive opening on the 15th too.  

This year we celebrated the first day of school together with our friends from the private school "St.Cyrillus and Metodius".

Our two institutions work together on arts, computers and sports, supporting each other with all available resourses. We share personnel, facilities and resourses, especially in the pre- and primary education. We take our children to the school for computers, Lego construction lessons and sports three times a week. Our teachers and artists work with the school classes on arts in the same time.

On September 15th we combined our efforts to make the day festive and full of promise.

The mini-busses took our children to the school where schoolchildren, parents and teachers have already gathered.

One of the high school students welcomed the preschoolers and the first graders and greeted parents and teachers. Then we listened to the school's anthem. After this solemn moments things were in our hands and a joyful show went on for about half an hour.

Children, actors and singers mixed together, entertaining each other with poems, songs and sketches. A clever clown examined the wit of children. There was even a special quiz for parents and teachers. And of course for every  correct answer there was a prize / not much, but something useful for school - pens, rulers, rubbers, notebooks, and such/. When we were all sure that children and teachers  are perfectly ready for the new school year, the director of the school invited everybody in.

Young students went to their classrooms, while our preschoolers visited the cabinets where they will have their first lessons in  computers, Lego construction and sports.

Then everyone was treated accordingly...

"Child's Friend" is a small private kindergarten founded and run by people engaged in Art: actors, writers, musicians, artists and of course wonderful preschool teachers.

Don't be mistaken by the colorful team we make. We are very serious about education. Our children learn and practice as many subjects as planned for all preschoolers, but we try to make their studies a greater  fun: more associative and easy to comprehend. We spend a lot of time preparing for every new lesson,   looking for books, toys and artistic illustrations on every theme. We try to make Language learning and Maths as much a game as Natural science and Geography.  We draw, sing, dance and play theatre during the lessons, involving arts in all subjects. But we also try to extract hints for science from arts like drawing, dancing, theatre and music.

What makes us different from the usual community kindergartens is that we work in smaller groups of  6-8 children.  That helps us pay more attention to their individual needs and characteristics. There is always time to hear them comment on the subject just studied and to answer most unexpected questions. I'm sure most colleagues could be as efficient as us, working with a few children around. The atmosphere is friendly and joyful, no boredom, distraction, and fatigue. We are a team of 7 artists and five teachers, working with 24 children, very  happy with the way we work and the results we get. But we are not to be envied for this possibility. Visiting us one of our project partners said: "It's a pleasure to work like that, but we can not afford it. It's very expensive." Yes, it could have been expensive, if our teachers and artists could be paid enough for their work. But each of them gets a little over   100 Euro monthly. And that refers to all teachers in our country. What motivates us is love for children and the feeling for personal responsibility for the future of Bulgarian children. Thanks to the Socrates Program of the EU, we work on Comenius projects since 2000. This is a great chance  for us to collaborate with wonderful partners and enrich each other with ideas and experiences. Strange as it may seem, but the money we get are an enormous relief to our feeble budget. It gives us the possibility to supply our lessons with quality consumatives. We even share some of them with other community schools when teachers ask us for help in the field of arts.

You could get a better idea of our kindergarten, the children and our various activities, if you visit our project web sites:

https://childsfriend0.tripod.com/SmFingers/index.htm

http://fairyproject.tripod.com/Fairytale/index.htm

You are welcome to contact me at

friend@mail.bol.bg

Tzvetana.