Mazhavilpookkal

We started with hello song and as warm up, we played tom and jerry. This is an interesting game which encourages random pair formation among children and sudden role reversal of prey into predator and vice versa. We have observed that sometimes kids have strong preferences for who their partner is, and we want to consciously soften this pattern so that bonding across the group is more uniform. Games in which partners come together and disperse, is being used as a tool to achieve this. After the game, we moved towards the core activity of the session, which was to figure out an object just from its touch and feel sensations. We had collected a bunch of day to day objects such as animal forms, models of furniture, utensils, vehicles etc.. We blindfolded the children one by one, and gave one object in their hand, and asked them to figure out what that is.( We used different blindfolds for individual children, in order to maintain hygiene.) They had to feel the object with their fingers an

After a couple of week s break, we were all very glad to catch up. We started  with greeting and acknowledging everyone s presence. In the last session, after a craftwork, we had asked children how they feel. We observed it was a difficult question for them to reflect on, and with some hesitation, couple of them had responded with words like “good” and “nice” etc. We planned to work on the vocabulary around feelings a little bit more, and did an activity in which there were faces depicting different emotions.  Sheets were of three different colors- Green, Yellow and Red. These translates to zones of regulation. Green zone is where we feel “good” and “Nice” but these are not feelings themselves. Which feelings makes us feel “good”? Probably, happiness, excitement, confidence, curiosity, peacefulness etc. Yellow sheet is for the yellow zone - where it starts getting difficult. Bored, annoyed, frustrated, confused, shy, morose, melancholy, nervous etc.  Red is where we are out of control.

I had carried my ukulele to the session and played some songs as we waited for everyone to assemble. Once all the little ones had arrived, we started with regular hello song and warm up. Salvin had a new game named house, tenant, flood. This game called for pair formations among participants, dissolving into chaos and then again into order. Afterwards, we introduced our much awaited intro exercise of visual arts. Salvin and children had a conversation about colors children are familiar with in the nature, such as color of leaves, flowers etc. then we all went out to collect few items from in and around our park. When we got back, we checked our ideas of color against what we had actually collected. For example, children, when asked what color are leaves, most certainly replies ‘green’. However when the leaves are actually paid close attention, we see a variety of colours, other than different shades of green, there are white, red, yellow, brown etc. W e used the collected material such