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Dear You

All Dear You participating schools are organized to have a Dear You friend roughly the same age in another country.  Dear You provides workshops or lesson plans for the children to create their art projects, which are then posted to their Dear You friend school abroad.  Each project takes about 60-90 minutes to complete.   Through Dear You’s initiative, the participants develop art, reading, writing, and social skills using activities that broaden their cultural horizon and promote positive self-esteem and identity.  The aim of Dear You is to encourage creativity and make friends with others!

There are two options for schools: Dear You workshop leaders--local professional artists go to the schools to lead workshops for the children in the school once a month.   Dear You lesson plans--Teachers of the class lead and carry out the monthly projects  Sign up for a session! Session 1: September - December  Session 2: January - April  Dear You art projects are unique and thoughtfully designed to support the multicultural and multilingual purposes of each assignment. They encourage dialogue about the children’s home, heritage and culture, and also bolster a child’s excitement about self-expression. The focus of Dear You art projects enables the students to have a better understanding of the world and other cultures, and build new international friendships.

School teachers can use the topics presented in the Dear You art projects as a way to support the school curriculum. Dear You takes a progressive, interdisciplinary approach to learning language, science, math and social skills alongside making art. Our creative journey to understanding ourselves and the impact we have on this world is achieved through the following monthly projects: 1st project: Who am I? 2nd project: Where is my home? 3rd project: What is my environment like? 4th project: How can I travel to visit my new Dear You friend?  A different art project is designed for each of the four meetings. These 4 individual projects are connected to make a logical structure. They explore our own selves, our homes, our surroundings and how we fit in context to each other.  We use all of our senses to approach and represent the world around us. All four components from the series can be put together to create an exhibition and/or installation of the artistic exchange.

Meeting our friends online is another facet to the project which deepens the relationships. We encourage the participants to meet periodically via video chat to talk about their Dear You art exchanges. The learning outcomes and discussions raised have been amazing! For example, one child in Helsinki asked, “Why is it morning in Finland when they just had afternoon snack in Vietnam?”  Face-to-face communication helps the friendships feel more real and the lessons learned can be more clear.

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Dear You Art Project

Dear You is an art project, which connects children aged 4-15 internationally through making and sharing art. These young artists living around the world exchange art they make for each other while also learning about each other’s cultures and languages.  In addition, this project promotes self expression, learning to read and write whilst developing artistic skills.  

The aim of Dear You is to enjoy the process of making art and making friends with others living in all corners of the world.  Dear You connects students as well as teachers, artists and schools through art and letter writing exchanges.  Dear You art projects are thoughtfully designed to fit the multicultural, multilingual and developmentally appropriate purposes of each assignment.  A unique approach to creating a comprehensive curriculum has been essential in order to accommodate the needs of all the Dear You participants, which to date exceeds 1,000 students from 33 different schools in 17 different countries worldwide.   Dear You is run by Arlene Tucker and Anastasia Artemeva.  Tucker and Artemeva are artists and educators currently based in Helsinki, Finland.