TASHKENT, Uzbekistan - A Christmas partnership between a school and a hotel in this former Soviet state stretched the skills and creativity of a fifth-grade class in all kinds of new directions. While Karrie Dietz's students at Tashkent International School admit that designing an elaborate holiday brochure for the Hotel Inter-Continental was hard work—even exasperating at times—every one of them would do it again in a heartbeat.
"Some parts were hard work, but it was fun!," a student named Aika enthuses, summing up the responses of her nine classmates.
Student-crafted text extolled the hotel's appealing features.
The month-long project grew out of an alliance that seems quite natural: an international school and an international hotel. The flagship hotel in Central Asia, the five-star Inter-Continental, hosts guests from around the world, just as the school serves kids from many nations. The names on the enrollment roster reveal the multinational makeup of the student body. With 20 countries represented at the school, the fifth-grade class alone brings together children from Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Israel, and South Korea, in addition to Uzbekistan and the United States.
To create the hotel's holiday brochure, the students had to dig deeply into their language and visual arts skills, translating text from English to Russian and creating original artwork. They also had to climb a steep learning curve in technology. The full-color, 16-page brochure advertising the hotel's lineup of holiday feasting and merrymaking required the fifth-graders to master a graphic layout program that would challenge any design professional. They also learned scanning, photo editing, and how to prepare computer files for the printer. They used e-mail to communicate with their collaborators, the hotel's marketing director and chef. They used a special keyboard and font for the Russian characters.
"The use of technology was the foundation of the project," says Dietz, whose home is in St. Paul, Minnesota. "It complemented our language arts, Russian, and computer curriculum especially well."
The resulting brochure combines the charm of children's drawings with the sophistication of professional graphic design for a publication that visually invites you to plunge in. The student-written text—surrounded by whimsical borders of holly and gingerbread boys, candy canes and musical notes—reveals a mouthwatering array of festivities. These include Christmas Eve brunch featuring roast duck and live jazz; hot spiced wine and marzipan stollen in the lobby; carols and a visit from Santa Claus; and a New Year's Eve party anchored by an elegant buffet and topped off with fireworks and champagne. The young designers scanned photos from last year's celebration—fireworks bursting against the night sky, Santa listening to a small child's wish list, a gingerbread house laced with white icing—and interspersed them with their own drawings.
"We felt professional," Katie says with pride.
The hotel judged the project a great success. "Tashkent's local citizens, as well as all expatriate communities, loved the brochure," says Stefan Athmann, the hotel's director of sales and marketing. "The hotel had an excellent promotional month of December and was fully booked on New Year's Eve. We definitely will choose the fifth-graders again."
For a more detailed look at the lesson plans and resources for "Creative Kids Go Pro" see the unit plan, http://educate.intel.com/en/ProjectDesign/UnitPlanIndex/CreativeKidsGoPro/ .