It is breezy and sunny on this Sunday morning in our room and I am taking advantage of my one morning off to lie in bed and write. Galen on the other hand is up again, going off to a village for an inter-caste and inter-gender field day event in a village that he is documenting for Village Action Group. This is his third one that he is going to this week. I can here the kids getting up which means that soon I will meander over to the boarding house to do my laundry and eat idlys with them.
Yesterday was my third full workshop, which I focused on “Art, Creativity, and Observation.” I used the teacher’s role when the children are working on creative art projects to delve a little more deeply into observation. I also planned 10 different art activities- thanks to some help from a book, Deborah, and Ramalingum the art teacher. However, the set up and organization of this workshop was tough. It took me 2 hours to prepare and set everything up. This means that I arrived at the school at 7 am. Shankar came in his dhoti, shirtless, to give me the key, and then went back home. Part of the reason it took me so long was that it took me a while to figure out how to make the paint the right consistency, (the paint that you can get here is quite different then the paint that we get in the US- more watery) and also because when I set up art projects I like to really have prepared carefully how materials should be set out. Over the week I had typed out descriptions of each activity. The activities were: line dropping collages, painting with straws and string, butterfly mirror image painting, print painting, water colors and tape, torn paper/cutting collages, making animal masks, drawing to music, constructing houses out of popsicle sticks., and creating name tags for the classroom. Some of them I tied to literacy by showing how you could read a book and then create the art project around it.
Teachers work with paints and create mirror images on butterfly wings
I gave the teachers the choice of which activity to begin with, but as they were very eager, most of them ended up trying all of them. I had a real mix of teachers in the group from 4 different schools! 7 teachers from Aikiyam (not including myself), 3 from the Kindergarten (a school in Auroville called “Kindergarten”), 2 from Nandenum, and 2 from Deepam (a school for children with Special Needs). To get to know each other we played some name games and one of the teacher from Nandenum lead some breathing and grounding exercises.
Mask making!!
Some of the art work made by the teachers!!!
Teachers sharing their art work!
More sharing!
Working on the art projects lasted well into tea/snack time. Afterwards everyone came back and shared what they had worked on. One teacher from Nandenum described how when I had explained one of the art projects she immediately was excited about doing it. Vijaya on the other hand shared about how she was frustrated by the same activity, and Usha described how she used a different technique to create her project. This was wonderful as we got to discuss how different children react differently to an activity and how one type of material might really speak to one child, but not to another. Sathiyavani (who teaches special needs to the children through 5th grade) told me that she was very happy as she had been searching for activities like these and she was learning a lot. A teacher from the kindergarten described how her class had been studying butterflies and how when they had children draw butterflies the children didn’t understand that butterfly wings have the same pattern on both sides of their wings. She was very excited about the mirror image butterfly painting project as she saw that through this she could help the children to understand the concept. After everyone shared, we moved to the block room where I had set up a slide show. However I began by focusing on just one drawing that a child in UKG had made during Free Play. I explained to the teachers that we were going to take some time to just look simply at this one drawing and describe what we saw such as colors, shapes, pencils marks, figures etc. without giving and judgments or ideas about what we thought the picture was about or what was in the picture. I explained that by doing this it would help us to look more closely at the piece of art work which would then help us observe all children and their art work more closely. We did a round of simply decribing and then another round during which I opened it up to more interpretive impressions and comments. Here is what the teachers saw in the drawing:
Very bright yellow in the center
Many shapes- such as triangles and square’s
There are 2 figures of the same size
There is a figure in the corner
Green circles
Bunch of purple- might be grapes
Same colors are reflected in the figure that may be a tree
There are groups of 2 different colors- purple and green
There are half circles on the top of the house figure
There are small rectangular shapes
A yellow circle
2 different things hanging from a tree
There is symmetry in the wings of the plane figure
It appears that he used pencil to outline his drawing first
He created a base of green on the bottom of the page
The trees, fruit and grass look very close to reality but the person and the airplane look like they came from his imagination.
He created the drawing on white paper and left spaces of white.
He put the sun on top of the clouds.
He wrote his name.
There are oval shapes at the top of the page, are they clouds or the sky?
He likes grapes- always draws grapes.
The figure may be his sister, Abirami, whom he loves
He has a lot of patience as there are many details in the drawing
First he drew the lines and then colored it in
He used natural colors
He used many small lines
Abishek's drawing that we described in the workshop!
Odile, a very experienced teacher from the kindergarten- in fact she was Praveena (now teacher in upper kindergarten at Aikiyam)’s kindergarten teacher- commented to me at the end of the workshop that she really enjoyed this activity and that she wanted to take it back and use it at staff meetings. This idea is not my own, of course, but comes from the Prospect School and is something I learned both in graduate school at Sarah Lawrence and at Prospect conferences. But I was very happy that even a very very experienced teacher was able to take something away that she may be able to use! I also got many ideas from her, as we were able to talk and she shared many things with me- I am getting very excited about the coming year and implementing some of these things into my own classroom!!!
After we did our descriptive review of the drawing, I showed some pictures of the children working on art projects both at Aikiyam and at Isai Amballam. Then I had put some time aside for the teachers to share different curriculum pieces from some of the schools that were represented. Odile talked about block building at the kindergarten and creativity in block building. The teachers from Aikiyam shared about Free Play and Anandi from Nandenum shared about a poetry/art collaboration that she had worked on when there was only one school in Auroville. By that time it was 12:10 and I didn’t want to hold the teachers up any longer- but best of all, it felt by that point that we had come together as a group and that the teachers had gotten to know each other and that there was a lot of interest and excitement in what each other’s schools were working on. I was also very grateful to all the Aikiyam teachers who helped me clean up and to Nava who brought me idly’s to eat!
Afterwards Vijaya asked me if she could bring me to a sari shop that was on the way to Pondi. I agreed and we hopped on her bike. I had admired one of her very casual sari’s saying that I needed more sari’s that were just for every day use (most of mine I feel like a royal princess when I wear them), so we went and she purchased as a gift for me (of course she wouldn’t let me pay) a nice light, synthetic sari which I am very excited to wear! Then we went into Pondicherry to visit her (sister, cousin- I missed how she was related with the wind and the noise on the ECR) friend and her husband who has cancer and has been doing poorly. We brought him some nice Auroville bread and kombucha and of course I got stuffed full of onion and potato baji, orange juice and sweets while we watched a comedy/horror Tamil movie.
Saturday night was movie night with the kids- Geetha and I re-watched the Princess Diaries 2 and stuffed ourselves with peanutts while the boys watched batman.
Sunday morning, Galen was off again to another exchange program and Vanitha, Manjula and I had a girls morning in Pondi shopping for gifts for my friends and some new earrings for me. In the afternoon I took the boys to the pool and then we made pizzas! The kids have been begging me to make pizzas with them since that is one of the things that we did last year together. The only problem is that the small toaster oven that we had used last year to bake the pizzas in had been thrown out (I am very glad about that as I electrocuted myself on it several times last year) so I had to figure out a way to make pizzas on the stove top. I decided trying to make pizza crust on the stove top was a night mare- although I found a recipe on line to do it, and I decided that we could use parattas as a base. So on Sunday afternoon, Parasu, Nirmalraj and Iypa served as my prep chefs- chopping veggies, Dhina and Geetha helped make the sauce and I sent the kids off to buy as many parratas as they could for 100 rupees. Turns out you can get at least 25! We made a delicious tomato sauce that exploded all over me when I went to blend it- fortunately all that happened as a result was that Geetha got a good laugh and my pride was wounded, the initial shock of having hot tomato sauce spatter all over my forearms was just shock and not actual real burns, and then we sautéed zuchinis and onions and grated LOTS of cheese and all the kids got to assemble the pizzas themselves while I worked as the chef putting them on the dosa pan under a hot flame with another heavy pan over it for a lid until the cheese and veggies had cooked. I hear that they were delicious (not eating cheese myself I actually did not partake in the pizza eating- just the cooking) and there was general happy chaos with the children making as many pizzas as possible and everyone from Tixon to Auro eating them! Good fun!
Dhina and Iypa being very serious about their pizza making!
Having fun!
Stove-top-parrata pizza!!
Now it is Monday and Galen and I both have the Monday blues- him quite a bit worse as two days out in the sun in rural villages dehydrated him and he came down with a fever this morning. I am just trying to pick myself back up after such a busy weekend and figure out what I need to do for this last workshop and what I need to do in general to wrap up my time here in Auroville.
This morning when I woke up the temple music was blaring- and as religion trumps all in India, sports have been canceled for the kids so everyone can celebrate in the village. In Roy’s boarding house however, we will eat sambar and do homework, and talk and probably have a quiet evening., which is just what I need tonight…
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