It was a serene evening when the sun was setting and it was time to wind down and leave school for the day. I was intrigued by a couple of kids busy making a cauldron of mud and water mixed together, cheerful as their hands, clothes and feet were covered with mud. 

It took me back to my childhood memory of playing hours in the sun and led me to wonder what they were up to. So I went closer and asked, looking at them busily toiling and moulding the mud, "What are we making here?" 

N looking at me says without a blink, "I'm making chapatis and lollipops!"

Being pulled into his imagination, I continued, "Oh, I wonder how it taste like?"

"It is brown chapatis because it is made of chocolate and it tastes chocolaty", was the response I received without a second further spent in the imagination.

I was struck by the thought of how play goes beyond what it seems like outwardly, to a process that involves imagination, thinking, connections and logic, innovation, reasoning, motor skills and a lot, lot more. 

​Here at SM we believe that play is just not an act but a deep learning process that a child involves in with all their senses and enriches with learning.

Contributed by Grace Veronica, Learning Facilitator at Sparkling Mindz Global Preschool.
​

We at Sparkling Mindz handle children's issues in different ways. One way is to model their behavior back to them, asking them to reflect, take perspective and empathize on how/what they are doing or how others feel as a result of their behavior.

Another way is through role plays and this time, the facilitators at preschool decided to role play as children. They chose three scenarios to role play:
a) taking every communication with peers as an attack and being rude in response to attack,
b) self victimizing by saying they have no friends, and
c) wanting to look like the others and not satisfied with how they already look (especially the skin color).

Each scenario explains what the facilitators role played and what children reflected after each of the scenes.

Scenario 1

Friend 1 makes fun of friend 2's drawing that leads friend 2 to be upset and get into a mode of rejecting the other's friendship and her opinion by telling herself things that are not productive.

Reflections
 
An, "The house can be drawn however we want it to be."
Em, "We should not be rude at other's work."
An, "Friend 1 did not care about what the other child said." 
An, "Yes, she cared only about herself."
Sh, "She was hurt!"
Aad "Friend 2 was upset and was telling herself that she wants to be on her own."
Anya " Yes, she kept telling bad things to herself like, I don't like other people and they are rude to me!"

At this point the facilitator asked them, "Did friend 2 telling herself bad things help her?"

All, "Nooo!!!"

Facilitator (F), "What could she tell herself instead?"

Various responses such as, "I like mine, but I don't know why she did not like mine...", "I like mine but maybe she likes the way she draws...", "We should like what others do...", etc., came out.

F, "Are we expecting others to tell good things about us?"
An, without a blink, "Yes!"

F, "Is it ok when somebody doesn't like what we do?"
An, "It's okay I'll like it anyway."
F, "Okay. You can also tell them politely , "I like the way I have painted.""
F2, "So what did we learn from this?"
An, "To be kind to others and ourselves."

And the facilitator added, "Saying good things to ourselves and what we choose to do is not for other people's approval."

Scenario 2

Facilitators role played 2 kids playing and talking about their interests. Another child who wanted to join them did not want to join them as he did not get invited, and how the child 3 feels sad.

​Reflections

"Hurray! It's our Sports Day!", screamed the children and facilitators alike. To us at SM, sports day is a celebration.

Celebrate what, you may ask? Well, we want to celebrate our growth, our togetherness, our hard work with respect to the trainings, learnings, pushing ourselves beyond our usual 'workout' days. 

And this year, the preschoolers of SM were introduced to a new team game. They took it with open arms, learning about what it's like to work with a team, be part of a team, resilience, focus, etc. They learned so much in the field…what more? They learned to take all this learning back to their classes too. 

Sports is not a goal or the finish line for us at SM, but an integral part of the classroom too, and this begins with our wide and deep disconnections on what sports means to them, what does it mean to fall, what can we do when we feel like giving up, and so on. These learnings they apply to their overall life too. Well, to get a glimpse on what Sports Day is to us and how the Sports Day of the academic year 2019 - '20 went, watch this video. We would like to extend our gratitude to Ajit Sivaram for capturing this culture beautifully.

​

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#sportsday2019

We were preparing for the upcoming event in our school,  the Poetic Soiree.   In order to help the 2 - 4 year olds understand and connect to poems,  I had a discussion about nursery rhymes.  The children got excited and started reciting the rhymes that they knew.  And then we discussed about how " Twinkle Twinkle little star" was about curiosity and how " Johnny Johnny, 'yes papa!'" was a funny poem/rhyme.  

We also discussed about how every poem had a title followed by the poet's name. Then I asked children if they would like to come up with their own poems. Rishi got excited about the idea of signing his own name as the poet and  said he wanted to attempt one.  And he rattled off so spontaneously that I had to rush for a pen to jot down his ideas. He chose to make a poem about his favourite colour,  blue.  His poem went like this:

"Blue,  blue,
How you got into the sky?"

He paused and when I asked if he wanted to add few more lines, he said,

"You are so beautiful, 
You are so cute."

And then  he came up with a title, "Blue ". After jotting down his poem on the board,  I asked him,  what would be the poet's name and he said with an air of pride, "Rishi Mukherjee!" 

The 3 to 4 year olds at SM were having their Movement Song today and they were running, walking, jumping, clapping, singing...and just pretending to be different animals. Post this, the facilitator thought it would be a good idea to sing '5 little monkeys' to get the whole class together when they started to run all over the place. As soon as they started the rhyme, the facilitator was in for a surprise! The rhyme took a whole new turn itself! They wanted to be dragons instead. So we sang...as follows:

5 little dragons flying in the sky,
One fell off and bumped his head.
Mamma called the doctor and the doctor said,
No more dragons...

S: Ma'am, dragons don't get hurt. They get up say arrrrrrrrr and fly away. 
F: Okay. 
5 little dragons flying in the sky,
One fell off and bumped his head.
Then he got up and..?
 
At this point they are all making dragon sounds. 
S: Then he got up and started flying because he's so strong. He doesn't get hurt. 

F: okay so how about,
5 little dragons flying in the sky,
One fell off and bumped his head.
He got up and said "Arrrrrrrrr"

They all were strong dragons at this point, enacting the whole thing out, screaming "arrrrrr"... 

F: And then? 
Collectively: He flew to the sky. 
F: Awesome! 

'Opened his wings and flew back to the sky!'
F: Does that sound okay?

S: YES!!!
F: Let's do it then!

The new song is as follows:

5 little dragons flying in the sky,
One fell off and bumped his head.
He got up and said "Arrrrrrrrr"
Opened his wings and flew back to the sky!

4 little dragons flying in the sky,
One fell off and bumped his head.
He got up and said "Arrrrrrrrr"
Opened his wings and flew back to the sky!

3 little dragons flying in the sky,
One fell off and bumped his head.
He got up and said "Arrrrrrrrr"
Opened his wings and flew back to the sky!

2 little dragons flying in the sky,
One fell off and bumped his head.
He got up and said "Arrrrrrrrr"
Opened his wings and flew back to the sky!

1 little dragon flying in the sky,
One fell off and bumped his head.
He got up and said "Arrrrrrrrr"
Opened his wings and flew back to the sky!

They loved this new rhyme that they co-created and have been pretending to be dragons ever since. They had to be brought back to reality by calling their names to shake the dragons off and come back to class again as themselves. 

Magic arrives and manifests when children are left to be themselves in the class. They truly become co-creators of their own learning, and enjoy the whole show. There was no facilitator in the class at that point, just a bunch of curious individuals who love to learn together!

The day for the 3 to 4 year olds had just begun where they all sat down after the Welcome Song. Since the new academic year has just been kick started, they were all pondering on the new things they were about to learn this year, things that they remember from last year, etc. 
They are currently in Cubs (3-4 years). The hierarchy at SM goes like this, 
Guppies, Pups, Calves, Cubs, Joeys, Dolphins, Leopards, Falcons and Unicorns (from 1.5 year olds to 18year olds) and An seemed curious. 

An: What is after Joeys, ma'am?
Facilitator (F): Dolphins. 
An: And then?
F: Then we have Leopards, Falcons and Unicorns.
Av: They are all animal names. 
F: Yes, absolutely!
An, not having registered Av's comment continues: It will take us a long time to get there. 
F: Yeah, a few years. Which is awesome because you will get to learn so much and have so much fun doing it too!!
An, looking like she's given up: Ahh, so tiring ma'am. We'll be so tired by then. 
F: What do you mean?
An: School is so boring ma'am. All these letters and numbers and activities. I don't want to come. 
F: Why do you feel like that? Because the An that I know loves to come and learn things. 
An (nodding a clear no): No I don't. I don't want to learn any of these. They are boring. I get so tired. It's so tiring. 

An has been visibly quite off since the morning, so the Facilitator asked her a couple more questions, which seemed to just go in the loops of 'tiring' and 'boring' and an overall 'quitting' mode. 

F: Are you really bored and tired, or are you just having a bad day?
An (suddenly sitting up, giving it a second to think, seemingly more clear in her thoughts now): I'm just having a bad day. 
F: What happened?
An: I didn't sleep well. I woke up to drink water. 

Then she was taken through the loops she had created in her head which connected school and her overall energy for that day, and given more clarity which she then agreed to that they were two separate things after all.
​
F: So you're saying you didn't sleep well and woke up at night and you're tired because of that?
An nods in agreement.
F: Does it still mean that you consider school boring and tiring? And you don't like the activities?
An: No I think I am just tired today. 
F: okay. See you just mixed it here. You were feeling tired because you didn't sleep well and you thought you didn't like school because of how tired you felt. See these two are not connected. 
An nodding in agreement: Yeah. 

She seemed to have resolved that little loop she had created and the rest of the day went by smooth for her and her energy seemed high too. 

It's important to help children see perspective and let them talk and figure things out for themselves without jumping in and resolving things immediately. Understanding their thought patterns and going deeper is essential to resolve conflicts and move ahead. What happened with this 4 year old was an important lesson for the child and the rest of the children who were listening to this conversation because it helped them see perspective and probably resolve things quicker later. 


Contributed by Sruthy Krishna, Learning Facilitator at Sparkling Mindz Global Preschool.

"Ma'am, we were looking for blue. We wanted to show you", says Aaditya and starts pointing out different shades of blue on his clothes, during the morning Circle Time in Sparkling Mindz Global Preschool.
All his 3 and 4 year old classmates get inspired by this and start running around, spotting all shades of blue. 
"Sky is dark blue ma'am", says Karthik by pointing at the worksheet he had taken home to colour. 
This goes on for a while until the facilitator asks," Are they all the same blue?", and they collectively agree that they are all different shades. 
"Why are they all different shades?", asks the facilitator again. 
"Because somebody likes different different colours", says Hasini with a lot of thought, and everybody agrees. 

"How can we make different shades?", asks facilitator.
Children came up with different combinations of colours such as mixing yellow, green and blue, red and blue, etc. to make dark blue and we agreed on experimenting post snacks. 
​
Here are the results: 
Siddharth tries to get green by using pink and black.

Aaditya comes running excitedly, pointing at his palms saying," Look, I made dark blue!!" It seemed like a lighter shade instead. 
"How did you make this colour?", asked the facilitator to which he responds, "I was mixing the colours and I washed my hand and mixed it" 

Abhijit mixes black with blue to try and get dark blue but black overpowers the little blue he had put. With a proud expression he told us that he's made dark blue!
"Hello guys!!", comes in Karthik with a victorious expression and clean hands, after making light blue by mixing blue and silver.
Anya finds her palms full of blue, "Wow", shows Hasini and wonders at how she arrived at that colour on her palms while Atharva mixes all the colours together and paints all over the chart.
"Hey! I got orange in this!!", screams an excited and surprised Avyan. When asked how he got that, he gives an expression of pondering how he arrived at that colour so he was left to his thoughts to reflect more. After a while he comes and says, "I made Iron Man colours - dark red and light yellow ma'am", and moved on to wash his hands.
"I painted blue at the back and golden in the front"', says Tanmayi when asked what she was painting.

Post this, their experiments were hung up on the wall with annotations, which they are always excited to look at with pride. In their eyes, they see perfection and learnings that they will talk about for a long time, and giving them the chances to experiment their thoughts bring in more questions, more curiosity, more wonder.


Children then went on a colour exploration on another day by mixing the primary colours (red, blue and yellow) in a bowl in the water with ink droppers. A wide variety of colours came in through :
"Look, Purple!", screamed Aaditya with excitement.
"I made Pink ma'am", calmly said Hasini with pride in her eyes.
"Mine is Red", replied Anya to Hasini.


They then asked for various other colours such as white, black, green etc.

Aaditya took white and black, and mixed them together to make "Purple!", he exclaimed, which he later changed to "Gray, ma'am."


Around this time, Avyan came in with a bucket, walking around collecting all the experimented coloured water in to clean up and they all cleaned up.

The next day was a Friday Connect where the whole school came together to do activities together. To take their experiments a step further, they were all given natural materials to make colours with: turmeric powder, coriander leaves, coffee powder, milk, tomatoes.

They started with attempting to get red colour out of the tomato pieces they were given.
"This is pink ma'am", said Tanya.

Then coffee powder made their papers brown. And when milk was given after they tried to get brown colour with coffee powder, Jordan goes," Ma'am, it smells so nice! Can I drink this?" and took a long breath to breathe it all in experiencing the freshness, Anagha follows.
​
Coriander leaves brought in a bit of a struggle as they were trying to squeeze to get the juice out. Some of them threw it to the side of the paper while some of them tried to stick it on their papers. When failed to stick, they moved on to playing with turmeric, making all of their papers and hands as yellow as the sun even after multiple attempts at washing them. It was already time to go home and some left with an unsatisfactory face as they couldn't experiment and make colours with the purple grapes that were put out in the front, but satisfied for having painted all over their papers in such amazing hues and shades of all sorts of colours with all sorts of things.

The end products were:

• Yellow hands
• Smelling like coffee
• Mostly torn papers due to overuse of watery substances and repeated scraping with tomatoes
• Wonder on why they couldn't get the colour green with the coriander leaves
• Slightly overwhelmed with the yellow colour of the turmeric
• Lots and lots of fun
• Understanding that colours come not just in paint boxes
• Trials and errors towards producing certain colours

Next week they read 'Mix It Up' book together to have a visual experience of mixing the primary colours and closed the mixing games and activities for the year aiming towards raising a generation that never stops to wonder or get inspired!  


Contributed by Sruthy Krishna, Learning Facilitator at Sparkling Mindz Global Preschool.

Invitation to Play (ITP) set up for the preschool children(2 to 4 year olds) that particular day was Light Play!

​As soon as they walked in, they noticed the curtains were all closed and the classroom was dark. They were left to wonder why for a few minutes. After a few moments of silence, the facilitator started to switch on the fairy lights, torch, light box, etc., without a word.
They gasped! "WOW!", cried out a few of them while the others ran to touch what they had just seen, throwing their bags all around the class with much excitement.

​To engage and experiment deeper, some of them took sketch pens and started drawing on the light box while some passed around the torch light around the light box to see if it created any additional effects. When they noticed there weren't much happening, the torch light was then separated and used individually by each child to see what it brought out on the walls and the floor - shadow hunt, playing with the intensity of light on different surfaces, etc. were some of the ways they played with the torch light. At this time, most of the children ran to pick up the trail of the fairy lights, jumping and twirling it around screaming and singing out their wonder and joy! A few more moments of light play later, they wound up the day's ITP.

​The next day, children were to explore shadows of their favorite objects from in and around the class as they seemed interested in exploring shadows the previous day. The class was darkened as usual with a torch light present. Unfortunately, the torch light's light wasn't strong enough to project shadows so the facilitator used the phone's torch light, which worked! When children saw this light, they got curious on the sharp light that was projected and started to explore that by placing various things above, under and around it. 

Some of them had difficulty figuring out how to trace and eventually figured it out with the help of the facilitator and other friends. Once they were all done, they got up one by one and went for free play, and wound up for the day.

The Pups and Calves were given a challenge in the morning for their morning ITP (Invitation To Play) where they were asked to create music. The twist was, they needed to make music with no musical instruments. 
The reaction was priceless - excitement, curiosity, eyes sparking up with wonder, confusion, lost...
F: Go ahead and make music! You can do it!

Suddenly they were everywhere. The facilitator wasn't prepared for their reaction. Some started clapping, some were trying to whistle, some banged the tables, walls, tables, some stomped, some made sounds with their mouths, some banged on beds, some took chairs and banged against the wall...needless to say there was a plethora of sounds that arrived as part of their experimentation. Some wanted to sing, so they did. 

Suddenly T says, "Let the girls sing and boys make music!"
And that was what happened. With a little help from the facilitator, girls got together and sang our school's anthem while boys clapped, stomped, whistled, etc. And vice versa. 
All in all, children had a gala of a time making music today with absolutely no instruments! 

Who said we need instruments to make music? As long as we have our imagination, we can achieve anything!

Contributed by Sruthy Krishna, Learning Facilitator at Sparkling Mindz Global Preschool.

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#21stcenturylearning
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#everychildcancreate
#everychildcanplay