smartgenie - fern city, priyanka

 
Session-7 Fern-City

This was good session with the children.  The theme of this session was "Coexistence".

The session started by we all sharing what makes us 'feel happy'.  I asked them to express it by drawing it or writing it down.  We shared this with each other.  We discovered that even doing this exercise of identifying what makes us feel happy, and sharing it – also makes us happy!

Following this – we had one round of 'appreciation'.  Every child shared what he/she liked about him/herself, and what he/she liked about anyone in the group.

We did meditation for a while – and brought the focus back to here and now.

After this we made paper-balls and played a game of aiming those balls to a card-board box kept about 3 feet away.  This was a big hit.  Everyone, including me, got three chances to put the ball into the box.  There were lot of cheers and encouragement – 'you can do it!', 'oh! Just missed', etc.

We started then with the main activity of the day – which was 'Coexistence'.  I had lots of cutouts of pictures of rocks, plants, animals, humans– which they were asked to classify between 'living' and 'non-living'.  We discussed why something is classified as living, and the others non-living.  We realized that different animals lived into different kinds of habitats.  So, we further classified the animals into land-animals and aquatic-animals.

We learned that on Earth – The habitat of any species became ready before that species appeared.  We played a game to emulate it.  I had distributed a sheet each to them – with a picture of 'pond in a jungle' drawn on it.  I raised the cutout of a fish, and asked them to ready the habitat for this fish – so that it could come and live happily?  Children were quick to color the pond…  They then soon also realized that fish would need food to live – and they drew worms, plants etc.  They made a little more aquatic life – and my fish was ready to go and live in their ponds!  I also brought out my surprise-item – some sea-shells, and asked them if they would like to stick those shells also on their drawing.  The kids were very happy to do that!

We had a snack break after this – and we ran to wash our hands…  The fun didn't stop even during eating.  We played rhyming words.  The kid who had brought carrot-halwa said "Red", then another one who had brought a sandwich – said "Bread", and so on!

After the snack-break we had a 'reading time'!  The children were really interested in reading about animals and their habitats.  I had brought some books with me on this subject.  The children read and discussed among themselves – while I sat and observed them, thinking that I will have more books for them next time for this.
We now played another game – in which the kids identified the homes for different land animals.  Like burrow for rabbit, nest for bird, etc.  We continued on the same sheet – and started finding the homes of different animals and birds in that jungle.  There sheets soon were filled with pasted pictures of animals and birds in the jungle, and the earlier black and white drawing was now full of colors.

We had story-time thereafter – where every child told a story around his/her drawing.  Wonderful stories - some wrote those stories down, while others shared by telling.

We all enjoyed this session very much.  We were all surprised to learn it was now time to go back home!