“Shouldn’t you just teach the students who are actually good at drawing, rest of them won’t get it.”

Sound familiar? The concept of education in our country is limited to the mark sheets of the students. Children who take interest in drawing, singing or any other form of arts are generally asked to focus on the studies, stop distracting themselves with the extracurriculars and concentrate on the ‘subjects that matter’. These challenges have so far disabled the arts from serving their actual purposes.

What makes you happy?

We asked the students this simple question based on an English rhyme from their syllabus book "A Happy Child" and got amusing answers in the form of drawings. Children told us that they are happiest about the tiny little things in their lives despite all the adversities that they face. 

Most of the things that we vividly remember from our school education either had a picture related to the text in the book, or the words painted a pretty picture in our minds. There are countless studies that have confirmed the power of visual imagery in learning. For instance, one study asked students to remember many groups of three words each, such as dog, bike, and street. Students who tried to remember the words by repeating them over and over again did poorly on recall. In comparison, students who made the effort to make visual associations with the three words, such as imagining a dog riding a bike down the street, had significantly better recall.

Do you remember stocking up friendship bands before going to school? All of us used to wait for friendship day each year and gifted friendship bands to our friends. In the month of August, we conducted the first set of Let's Start Art workshops on the same theme. We asked the students to draw their friends and narrate their friendship stories. 

In the second set of art sessions, we asked the students to ponder over the question- 'How exploring space improves life on earth?'. 

Wouldn't you love to watch your favorite movie with a nice cup of tea? This is what our theme was for the Let's Start Art sessions this month- Chai (tea) and Favourite movie. Schools reopened after long summer vacation, so the students were more excited than usual for the art class and Chai seemed to be a popular thing among children.

The academic year 2018-19 comes to its end in this March, so we conducted the last of Let's Start Art workshops for the session in the month of February. The students of class 3rd, 4th, and 5th belong to the age group of children who spend a lot of their time playing indoor and outdoor. So, in this session, we asked the students to draw their experiences about playing with dogs and received amazing stories.

Let's Start Art sessions this month were conducted under the theme of The Winter Season and Family Pictures. The first set of workshops started in the first week of the month and we asked the students to draw their family photo. 

A number of 162 students from 10 schools attended these workshops.