I would like to give you a little sneak peak of what our beautiful tamariki have done over the last few weeks.

As you might have heard I started a little art program with some of our classes in the Lower School last year. While doing this I quickly realised our paint brushes had seen some better days - some had sticky/gluey hair, some paint brush heads just fell off while painting and some did not look like an actual paint brush anymore. Overall they looked very, very sad.

The idea was to teach our children in the Lower School how wonderful art can be if they create it themselves, how relaxing art can be if they are stressed, sad, or just have an emotional day. I wanted to teach them how colorful our world can be even on grey day. But with broken/not working brushes - difficult.

At the same time I ask myself: how do we teach our children to care for our precious school resources as I quite often see students not care about things if they don’t belong to them…

The only way of teaching them was recycling the old brushes rather than buy new ones and put some hard work in it.

I was not very tempted to just sand and oil them as I thought I need to find something which is exciting, new and absolutely unique for the kids - I needed to come up with an idea that every student would engage with, that children would feel proud of, almost they would want to own the brush, look after and care for it.

Working in the film industry for more than 20 years, brushes have been my main tools - no matter what size. I designed and sold them in my own little workshop overseas and tested a lot for big companies. I took many brushes apart and sticked them back together, redesigned some new if they were not the right ones for me to work with.

So I came up with the idea to make them as beautiful as possible.  Very quickly I created a color concept of what they could look like, how it could work with little hands and our project 'Brush Up!’ was born!

From that moment on we worked with our amazing children week over week on this project and I must say I’m absolutely stoked how engaged, hard working and creative they were.

Every single brush came out absolutely beautiful and I’m so so proud of them! Well done everybody!

Also I wanted to say a biiiiig Thank You! to Mario our wood work teacher and some of the Upper School students as they helped us by sanding the paint brush handles and took the brush heads off.

We couldn’t have done this without you! Thank you!

A big Thank You also goes to Irene who believed in me and the kids repairing skills and gave me the chance to try something new!

Thank you so much - It’s been so wonderful to work on this ‘little’ (not so little) side project.

It takes a village… as always!

All the best,

Line