Sometimes, these kids do come up with such funny things – their sense of humour and powers of observation are amazing. So while explaining few and many, distributing worksheets, doing exercises like circle the few or the many, one of the kids suddenly comes up with – “Oh, I understand it’s like few ma’am, many children “.
After that we just sailed through the concept.
On completing a join-the-dots worksheet that made a house, one kid proceeds to draw a clothes line next to it with garments of all description drying on it.
Another day, we were working with flash cards for words with A. After the usual apple, ant, ankle, etc we decided it was time for a bit of vocabulary building. So out came the next set of cards – A for abacus, aeroplane, asparagus, almonds, air! Picture of Almonds enticed all, asparagus took some explaining but the pretty pink and green was great for drawing. The outright winner though was “air”. So much huffing and puffing meant we all learnt “A for air” but needed a big breather soon. I thought the boys would go for the aeroplane, but one of our girls picked it up and said I’ll fly in it one day. May that happen!
There’s a girl in our school, lets call her B. About eight years old – very bright, eager to learn, loves to draw. My sister, who was visiting from Delhi, came along one day as a guest teacher. That’s when we realised B was a great sketch artist – she had a new face and with deft strokes sketched her portrait. And it was good! With formal training, she would stand out for sure!