Today Shaila got a nice little wooden table for us to put our art work on! We argued about the best place to set it at and finally settled on the pavement adjoining Astley Hall’s boundary wall where we could sit under the sun and also hog the usual space around the boundary wall! Little greedy group, us! The table made all the difference in setting us down as a serious bunch with a mission!

Our usual kids- Naina, Bhola and others were there and today we had a lot of girls coming in, which is great!

I will write about the different groups that these kids have created among themselves, in my next update to better explain why the involvement of the girls is so exciting. The new entrants were not sure about what to do with the colours since they have never held a pen in all their lives and to make them more comfortable with the crayons, we played the “Start” and “Stop” routine with colours, wherein the girls had to start colouring madly on the chart paper when I screamed “Start” and had to stop when I said the word! It was a lot of fun and we later experimented with two crayons in both hands, three crayons held together in one hand until we had a beautiful mess of all colours that you can think of on paper! Shaila and the other kids then painted abstract designs on the crayons and it became quite a piece of art!

Since we started out with the painting, the kids have all seemed to be fixated on drawing hearts and after watching them doodle heart-shapes of all possible sizes, colours and shapes too (!!), I was honestly dreading another one today! But the kids are now exploring colours, shapes and what they can do with their paint brushes and sketch pens. One of them also drew Clock Tower today, which is great!

   Of course, the hearts still seem to find their place!