​Times have been unpredictable, with the COVID-19 spreading, driving the world to take refuge in a dark shell of uncertainty. First, the schools were shut, then we were to keep our distance from each other and then, a complete lock down extending for over a month. Does this mean we shut everything down? Should children's learning stop? How are parents going to keep them engaged? These are some of the questions we asked ourselves.

We, at Sparkling Mindz value and nurture growth mindset. We believe that there is always a way, even in the face of adversities. We took to technology and reconnected with our children over video calls. Our children too vibed with our mindset, that NO Virus Can Stop Our LEARNING! 

We have been connecting with our children ranging from 7year Olds to 14 year Olds, reiterating to them about the importance of managing themselves mentally, emotionally and physically, and being able to create a routine that involves productive engagement. Oh! trust me, our children can create amazing schedules for themselves. 

On the last video call with our youngest group of children (the 7 to 8 year Olds), we presented a variety of activities that they could add to their schedules, which included different kinds of chores, workouts, experiments, skill building activities etc. Our children were  more than delighted to accept the repertoire of  options to choose from. 

Here, we have V trying to pick ice cubes with a piece of string as part of his play and learn experiment. The joy on his face shows us his engagement and wonder. Knowing V, we can imagine the curious wonder questions and observations he must have made while he experimented. 

Here is our Advika, doing the same challenge, inspiring all of us in the process, in her own creative way!

We viewed this adversity not as a hindrance but rather as an opportunity that presented itself to help our children and us learn and grow through it. 

Children, need to be encouraged to deal with adversities with a growth mindset. Why? So they become individuals who can deal with their circumstances without giving up on themselves or their dreams.


Contributed by Disha HK, Learning Facilitator at Sparkling Mindz Global School.

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Before the pandemic and online classes became the new normal, children at Sparkling Mindz had been discussing the 'power within me' in their House Circle. This was a culmination of the theme for the previous year and the various inspiring ways in which the children had engaged with it. 
With the online mode of operation becoming a reality, we decided to bring together their inspiration in the form of a newsletter. Now, if this newsletter had to take forward their House Circle Time, it had to be essentially 'for the students, of the students, by the students'. 
We are glad to say that it is - from compiling their individual inspirations, to documenting their journeys of finding the 'power within me' in the form of a cover story, adding other external elements like crosswords and quotes, requesting a facilitator to write a column, self-learning the aspects of layout on an online platform to the final writing, designing and reviewing - it is an example authentic student-work. It is not perfect, but glorious. It is not a 'product' but an output of genuine student-led learning. It is the start of a new learning curve. It is the first of the many SM Times' to come in the future. 

Who said learning has to ever stop even when we are quarantined? 

Today we met our 5 to 6 year olds on Zoom for a year end reflection session. As discussed, they all waited for their turn to share, learned to speak by independently, talked about their favorite memories from their class. They also bid farewell and sent love and good wishes to those they will not be seeing next year as they move to Dolphins (1st grade) and mostly, they held space for each other.

They learned that learning can happen anywhere!

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It's the month of August, the month that's special for every Indian. It was the month in which India achieved Independence from the British rule 73 years ago. As the rest of India celebrates this month by reminiscing the sacrifice of the various people who contributed to the Indian freedom movement, our pre-schoolers (5-6 year olds) at Sparkling Mindz began their discussion with a prompt "What do they love about India?" and the following were their responses along with how the discussion moved forward.

*Sh: I love that India is a big country and I love the national anthem.
Sh: Why do we sing the national anthem?
Ash: We sing national anthem to wish India*

This opened up an opportunity to discuss about the geography of India. The States, union territories and their capitals. How big India was before Independence and how big is it now and a little about the national anthem.
*Ana: I love that freedom fighters fought for our country*

This led us to discuss about who did the freedom fighters fight against and why? Why did the British East India company come to India? Who were the freedom fighters and how did they fight (Violence and Non violence)?

*Em: everywhere I travel in India, I love the buildings*
This led us to discuss about the famous monuments or heritage towns in India.

*Aad: I love India because it's colorful*
This opened up an opportunity to talk about the diversity in language, food, clothing, culture etc. And how inspite of our difference we love each other.
*Tan: I love India because it's beautiful*
*Abh: But, there are also people who litter in India*
This statement ignited a spark in the class and everybody seemed upset and concerned.
Facilitator: Why do you think people litter in India.
Abh: Because they are bad people.
Facilitator: It is? Sometimes in class we forget to follow ground rules, does that make us bad people?
Class: No, they just don't know the ground rules.
Facilitator: what do you think we should all do about this?
Tan: When somebody litters we can take it and throw in the dustbin.
Facilitator: Do you think they will learn if we pick up all the garbage for them? Is it possible for us to pick up all the garbage in India?
Ved: We need to clean our roads.
Abhi: We need to have more bins on the pathways.
Avy: We need to have poop bins for the dogs on the streets.
Adi: If you don't find garbage bin, keep it in a bag and throw it when you see a dust bin.
Post this discussion, children began reporting about littering incidents they come across on a daily basis while traveling from school to home and other places.
Noticing the concern and the spark in children to make a change, the facilitator gave them a choice to come up with ways to educate people on keeping India clean.
​
Few suggestions they came up with were-
1. Role play
2. Making placards
3. Making videos
4. Writing letters

Considering all their suggestion the facilitator helped them thread through a mime which they performed to educate their parents on Independence day. They also went about and wrote letters to people they see littering the streets. 

​Contributed by Yashika CG, Facilitator, Sparkling Mindz Global Preschool

As part of their Independence day visit,  our pre-schoolers expressed interest in knowing more about the freedom fighters. Considering their curiosity, they were taken to Freedom park, a place that served as a prison during Indian freedom movement which is now converted into a park. 

As children arrived at Freedom Park, A noticed grass growing on the gaps between the tiles on the pavement and screamed.

A: Stop everyone! Do not step on the grass! 
He succeeded in getting everybody's attention and they walked carefully making sure to not step on the grass. 

Post this incident of A displaying kindness and care and encouraging others to do the same, they walked ahead exploring the different areas of the park, the prisons, the execution place etc. As they walked, they came across a little insect strolling on the grass. Av, picked up a small twig and killed the insect. 
Rest of the group screamed: Ma'am Av killed the insect.
Em (visibly upset): it didn't even do anything to us.

Seeing his friends holding him accountable for his behavior, Av feels bad and tries to defend himself by speaking gibberish. 
​

A while later, children exploring the park found a fallen branch. They picked it up and started playing tug-of-war (it's been their favorite game ever since it was introduced to them a year ago). Just then, M saw it and ran to her friends. 
M: Everybody stop! You'll get hurt.

It's Poetic Soiree time of the year again and the preschoolers are busy practising their poems. The two 4 year olds in Cubs class at SM Preschool were reciting their poem called Invention by Shel Silverstein, which goes like,

I've done it, I've done it!
Guess what I've done!
Invented a light that plugs into the sun.
The sun is bright enough,
The bulb is strong enough
But, oh, there's only one thing wrong...
The cord ain't long enough.

Post this recital, the Cubs weren't happy with leaving the ending in a way where the invention seemed useless. So together they solved the problem, and came up with an extension to the poem with the help of the facilitator,

' So I take six ladders,
Put them together as one.
Then I take a few cords,
Attach them together
And plug it into the sun!'

Children used empathy as a tool here to come up with solutions. They stepped into the shoes of the poet, became the poem and realized that they could help figure out what the poet can do to make the invention work! At first they were unhappy with the original ending, as they found it ending with a problem and not a solution. And almost immediately, with no intervention required, they started exploring various solutions for the same. They moved around the class, pretending the sun to be at a high place, having a short cord, asking each other what they can do. And in a matter of less than 5 minutes, they solved it together as a group! 

When children are invited to wonder, the world of curiosities open up. They step into that world and emerge out victorious with questions, solutions, answers...Perhaps that's all we need as children and adults, a safe space to wonder, be curious, ask questions and figure things out. 


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

​"Ma'am Aad broke it!" came Avi running to me holding 2 pieces of a plastic block they were playing with.

Aad looked concerned.

I bent down to the mirror cave he was sitting in with a blank expression and asked him what had happened. 

"I was playing with it and it broke", replied Aad.

"Okay. How can we fix this?" to which he said with so much hope, "I'll fix it with a glue!!!", and he runs to his class to get the glue. Aad and Av are part of the Cubs (4 year olds at SM). This happened before the class started (around 8:40am). 

He came back with 2 glue sticks and a fevistick. He realized that with the glue stick, the pieces wouldn't stick. So he switched to fevistick without a word. "I am putting only little ma'am", said Aad. Since children were pouring in too much fevicol to stick little things, we had a discussion on how much glue was too much which, he seemed to have remembered at this point and put to practice. He came to sit next to where I was sitting, trying to get it together, without giving up.

It was so evident how much he had grown as a person when I saw him not giving up on it because it's easier to give up and not try harder if the first few tries fail. 

"It's not sticking ma'am", said Aad with a perplexed expression. 

"Don't give up. Keep trying!" I reinforced. And he followed suit. He did not give up.  

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!

"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.