We closed on 14th Oct and we came back in action on 25th November. The Teacher Learners (TL) team met to plan the children’s return. We made our day plans for the first week and also chalked out how to ensure the children were well equipped to deal with the cold. We started by watching together Mira Nair’s “Queen of Katwe”, a biographical sports drama about Phiona, a girl who finds chess as her passport to a better world, out of her slum, in Uganda.
This month also marks, enjoying classes in the winter sun and so outdoor learning.
The first Saturday workshop of this session was on Health and nutritious food. This time we had members of SATHI, an organization working on health issues, discuss healthy food with the children. It is interesting that often education gets limited to intellectual development but for the children at the Jeevanshala, physical and intellectual growth are closely tied together, coming from vulnerable families, ill health is often a cause for children loosing out on their lessons and classes. Swapnil and Shailesh, gifted the children a microscope for the Jeevanshala and also helped them see microscopic organisms, through the microscope.
Happy New Year, hope 2024 goes well for everyone. We ended the year, with celebrating Christmas day, as you know we have children from different faiths and communities. Children decorated the mango tree, learned about Jesus Christ, and ate cake, which they baked with Kanika. Also, as part of the last workshop of the year, there was a discussion on friendship. While discussing the meaning of friendship, the children themselves realized how discriminatory some of their friendships can be. After group work, a word map was made, which helped them understand how their friendships are sometimes bound by the restrictions of identity. The workshop emphasized that if they do not try to break these boundaries then it is possible that in the future the difference in their identities may take the form of hatred for each other. As part of the workshop, children were encouraged to make friends, without looking at someone’s caste, gender, or religion.
And yet again our kids said “We can!” Usually we assume girls are physically weaker than boys, my quizzical look when I saw our girls take on a sack to be taken to the kitchen, and the determination “We can” they seemed to have said …
Mosamat Budhiya Shiksha Nirman Sangathan 