SAIIER 2020:Auroville Rainbow Child program
Entity::Auroville Rainbow Child program
by Gala
The aim of the project is to help Auroville children to learn to be more focus and concentrated, to accomplish life goals with success and acquire new skills additional to a formal school education.
Description of project:
Regular classes of Yoga, Energetic Games, Arts & Crafts for children were held in Pitanga hall on Saturdays. Around 21 children from different schools and kindergartens participated regularly, aged from 5 to 13. The classes where held by Gala.
This year the Yoga classes continued to be over-full, sometimes with more kids than could fit in the yoga room at Pitanga. In Yoga classes we continued to work with Asanas and Pranayama. We added more new Asanas and Pranayama exercises for children to learn and develop themselves.
This year in Energetic Games we mostly focused on development of memory and learning how to deeply concentrate on specific aspects. This will help the children in life and study. We played various games such as “Little Buddha”, where one child concentrates within the mental being and anchors with concentration, and the other children try to shift him from the deep concentration using only Pantomime. Another game was “Coloring Chakras” and working with crystals.
This year we continued to work deeper on emotions, especially impatience, anger and frustration, as I felt these were important to work on to manage in life.
I implemented new activities such as games and activities connected with the emotional being. Through “Group Mandala” the children are able to express their feelings with color and unite various people's feelings into one mandala. Each child has 1 minute to express (by coloring) and then mandala is passed to the next person in the circle.
For older children (mostly boys) I have implemented Pyrography. By doing pyrography the children are able to express their feelings by preparing a piece of wood. And then they burn (safely) the piece of wood using a pyrography tool. This can let out anger and anxiety. It also can teach children to be patient and work slowly and precisely.
All ages of children (mostly girls) worked with Looming. They made loom bands with various colors and designs. This activity uses fine motor skills, mathematical calculations and designing with color, and is calming to the nervous system.
This year I invited Manojkumar to offer his Palmyra leaves origami work as an activity. He came regularly and did various art pieces with the children. This type of work helped children develop 3D understanding.
Other activities were Spirograph tool for the smaller kids, making hair clips with glue gun and flower decorations (for family and friends), and drawing on fabric using fabric markers.
Outcomes:
The result was that children of different ages, from different schools and with different health specifics (such as asthmatic and hearing and speech difficulty) improved their ability to integrate in this life, to be able to communicate and socialize with other people. They practiced creativity and concentration and became more aware of their emotions.
Reflections:
When working with “Group Mandala” we integrated the various emotions of different people, and this helped the children understand that they can stick together all emotions into one integrated being and be completely united with themselves as a whole.
When we worked with Anger and frustration and analyzed where the source of this feeling came from, girls could more easily switch and change their emotions to calm and understanding than boys could. With boys we had to add more mental and life examples for them to switch and understand how to be more calm and understanding.
Through working with emotions, we have seen that if children understand how to direct their emotion into the right path, they are able to take it under control and easier communicate with people.
While working with Manoj the children worked with natural elements and learned to care about living beings such as Palmyra trees and how to recycle leaves into beautiful origami items. They learned to remember instructions and procedures for each origami item. For some children it was complicated but with the help of Manoj they manged to learn a lot and have developed themselves.
Conclusion:
This year was successful especially with working with emotions. I was glad that children were still interested in arts and crafts. They enjoyed working with the new helper Manoj.
In the next year we will be working with new materials such as plywood to work more and deeper with Pyrography technique. We also plan to work with sounds using musical instruments to develop hearing and understanding.
In the beginning of the next school year in July 2020, we will decide together with the children which emotions and aspects through sounds and music we will work throughout the new school year.
We would still like to expand and add new classes. With this we would be able to divide the older and younger kids in different classes, so as to work on a deeper level and develop according to the needs of each group of children by age.
