“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.

Can you interpret your child's drawing?
Child Art is a result of the observations, emotions, experiences and imagination of a child, which later helps her develop into a creative person. While our children put so much effort into their drawing, we have a habit of distinguishing them as good or bad without even trying to understand them.

Some drawings are just drawings, with obvious meaning. But sometimes you can discover deeper meanings out of your child's drawings, and figure out what she/he is feeling or trying to express.

As the pandemic began to rise across the world, baffling the best of the world's doctors and scientists working in the search of its cure, the only directives suggested for common people were to keep washing hands and maintain social distance. In March, a nationwide lockdown was ordered to contain the spread of the virus, limiting the movement of the entire population of India. 

It has been seven months since then, and education, as a result, has largely moved online. However, the question is, "Was India ready for this shift to online learning?"

While the concept of arts-integrated learning is still new in India, the students who have been attending Let's Start Art sessions have found their ways in relating the routine subjects with arts and learn better. The first set of art sessions in the month of January were conducted on the theme "If Trees could walk" taken from a poem in their Hindi textbook.

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.