It was 9:05am, which meant, it was time for the preschool children at SM to go into their respective classes to begin their day. As I was calling them all in to the class from the front space of the school, Aarav was looking around the window area , looking out, touching the surface, etc. He seemed to be in deep thoughts. As I called him too to go to his class, he stopped me and asked me, "Ma'am, how do we close the window?" 

Aarav and Aadya stared at this in wonder, trying to have an experience of opening and closing the window. After having figured it out, they happily jumped out and ran to their class with a newer dimension of thinking about how they could close the window. 

This little conversation served as a morning inspiration as it was yet another reminder about how curious children are about every little thing. And their passion to figure things out, and also helping others to figure things out. 


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

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. 
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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.