IZmir Ideal city

This is just to let you know our meeting went regarding kindergarten participation in the Comenius project to date. All of the kindergarten classes have had meetings together and discussed the kinds of components they would like to see in their "Ideal City." We ended up with a fabulous master list which was comprised of the following:

1. Restaurants 2. swimming pools 3. the sea 4. amusement parks 5. lots of flowers and trees and greenery 6. a school that every child in the city could attend 7. gifts hidden in places so that when children are walking down the street they would spontaneously find them 8. gifts hanging from trees 9. the city should be colourful 10. from time to time there should be fireworks going off intermittently throughout the day 11. everyone should be wearing costumes all the time 12. there should be skyscrapers 13. only race cars allowed 14. there shouldn't be too many people in the city 15. it should have a giant aquarium 16. there should be submarines 17. it should be a place where no money is needed 18. there should be bicycle paths 19. lots of butterflies 20. lots of birds 21. there should be paths for walking

22. there should always be snow 23. bridges 24. the homes should be single dwellings with swimming pools 25. there should be lots of shopping malls 26. there should be a library on every street 27. there should be pyramid like they have in Egypt 28. there should be parks with flowers and greenery and all the houses should have trees 29. historical properties 30. there should be special places for animals to live

It was interesting for us to note that many of the ideas came out in several classes like parks, shopping malls, bridges, etc. Obviously we chose not to record repetitively on our master list.

When it comes to our options for realizing the actual city itself and the form it could possibly take, all the teachers seem to agree that we are going to need significant support from our art teacher. In fact most of the teachers seem to think that she might be able to include the project in its entirety in her program, with the discussions falling to the home teachers. Here are some of the ideas that we came up with for representing our ideal city with the children in a visual way that can be shared with our partner classes in the other countries.

1. A large mural on a prominent wall in the school 2. a small mural in a couple of locations 3. a 3­D model of the city 4. something on paper that could be displayed and then divided amongst the children 5. a small book 6. a large book 7. decorate aboard 8. shadow artwork displaying the images symbolically

9. a collage of artwork which is combined from the entirety of the four classes which could then be scanned and made into a picture, an icon, something for T­shirt, something for a card, something that can be printed on a tablecloth or a sweatshirt, the school might even like to use it for the cover of the agendas in the coming academic school year

At any rate, in our first meeting we had decided that we would choose 12 points from all of the master list of ideas that the children came up with. Based on the teachers voting system, which was very meticulous and orderly thanks to our dear Vice Principal, we came up with the following: 1. sea 2. amusement parks 3. flowers trees and greenery 4. a school 5. everyone should wear costumes 6. parks 7. single dwelling homes with pools and trees 8. bridges 9. bicycle paths 10. places for animals to live 11. libraries on every street corner 12. hidden gifts for people to find spontaneously 13. fireworks from time to time – since this is not going to be a permanent part of the city, rather spontaneous and intermittent we don't count it as an actual item on the list.

Our next plan of action is for the English teachers and Vice Principal to have a meeting with the art teacher and present the results of the meeting to her and see what kind of contribution she feels she might be able to make to the project.

Notes taken and recorded and shared by Sherrie­Lynn Dogurga.

December 6, 2011