This is to share my experience today apart from many others at Unnati. Today was a special one; actually it kindled the child in me so thoughtto write it. It just happened after i took a test of children, (thanksto absence of Anshul today, he and Puneet generally do it) Drawings andpaintings have always been my craze, i used to do a lot in school days.

SoI thought let me, start it again with these kids and I got an
overwhelming response to the call for it from kids. I don’t know how it came, I asked all of kids to draw a line between two dots with a freehand first ........to my amusement lots of them made a pretty straight one.. then again with the help of the dots i came to square, rectangle, triangle, and then came the most good one the Circle... now no dots to tell then how to draw... so i reminded them all the round things and then asked them to imagine how it looks like and draw in air the circle with pencil in clockwise direction.. then put the impressions on the paper ..they drew well.. seeing them drawing in air was an sight very nice.. the child in me came alive… Now finally the stage was set for the drawing there favorite "Hut"..so combining all the basic geometrical figures and with help of dots i got it made easily from the kids..When the basic structure of hut was made, it was time to draw the doors, windows, chimney, smoke and a tree …so while drawing they even became familiar with these few words, they well wrote in Badi English(Upercase) and choti English(Lowercase)…instead of writing them I tried to make them construct the words, they picked it fast, but how much they would retain.. lets hope for it .. But It was tough time when I asked the children what is darwaza in English.. and they all said GATE. I got Confused how to answer now….Ideally to have gate to ones own house is a thing which is too difficult for even the privileged one in this city, and then these children don’t even have a door to their house leave apart the gate or the window … so to make them understand or even explain them the difference between door and gate was tough but then I tried to make them learn “door” anyway. But this again made me think, was it difficult for us to learn these things which were around us in the home, and mum often asked to close the window when the winds blow and
door when we came back any time from school or playground and left it wide open to mosquitoes or the Gate, when she was always worried of the cows ruining her flowers in the garden, all these things came very natural to us…Another tough time, it was when I asked what is this drawing(hut) called?..One of the bright kids Sanayak, promptly said HOUSE..i was to tell them HOME ..again it was quite difficult to tell them the difference between a HOME and HOUSE ..Majority of them, I guess don’t have one.. But in the end what, I thought of the things we have never thought off how these passive learning’s in our life takes place and thanked God for my small town upbringing, among people quite content, disciplined and
righteous. We enjoyed all the four seasons to the fullest, and in a
city how this difference of the season “pinches us actually “. Learning was that to make them identify the words it was important they visualize with respect to their surroundings. I hope to continue next time with mountains, river, sun moon, day and night, rains and clouds …all these beautiful sights were around my school there was mountain in front of us an river flowing in back of school and a beautiful valley along the river where we use to bunk classes (only when we became rouge in class tenth ..Hey Puneet hope u remember! ), so I never felt difficult to imagine the mountains and different seasons as all the seasons were in abundance. Along with other children in big cities these kids are also unfortunate in this regard..But if not passive learning let them introduce the beauty of these thing actively... So let’s keep discovering ourselves!

- Munish Duvedi