45 children gathered for the for the very first library workshop of 2020 on Saturday, 18 January 2020.
The four teams, red, blue, yellow and green were quickly formed. Each team had a junior and a senior sub-team. A round of relay as a warm up had the children ready and charged for the games ahead. The carefully curated activities were aimed at building English language skills, skills in mathematics  and developing understanding of science. Some games had the Juniors (ages 6-9) competing against each other, some involved the Seniors (ages 10-14) competing and some activities had them coming together and competing.

Juniors

Dictionary stories, involved children racing to get a set of words which they had to arrange in alphabetical order. After completing the first part, the juniors now had to use the words to build a story. Team work and co-ordination were the key lessons learnt.

Ice cream cones - each child got a sheet with instructions they had to follow to fill the ice cream cone printed on the sheet, using Ordinal numbers. Only two children, got the trick question correct - it involved identifying the "first scoop" on the ice-cream - our kids need to work on thinking skills involving common sense!

Roll your Score - A round of quick addition based on throw of dice, indicates that most of our DI juniors are fairly good in their mental addition. The Seniors did the same but with two dice and variations like addition, multiplication, and subtraction.

Seniors
Zoom, taught the participants the art of making accurate guesses and calculated estimations, using decimal fractions. Uncle Les demonstrated the technique and  soon children made estimates leading to the correct decimal number.  Points were earned for arriving at the correct answer in fewest guesses. This was a competitive game and the seniors enjoyed using the new found technique to understand decimals.

Speed Test, required the children to follow a set of written instructions. Our seniors were seeing carrying out the instructions, enjoying thoroughly and thinking how easy these tasks were. Tasks such as shouting out "I'm the best" and standing on one leg while chanting "I love this camp", writing their names backwards etc.  It was only Shweta Jha from the Blue team, who read and followed the instructions correctly. The very first instruction asked the kids to read the entire set of instructions before starting. The last instruction was to write your name on the paper and do nothing else.  Most started acting on one instruction after the other, without following the very first instruction. Reading and understanding instructions is a very important life skill, specially for our seniors who have exams coming up. The lesson learnt was to read carefully, specially your question paper, before starting to write the answers.

Games played together
Shopping Whispers, involved the participants remembering a shopping list and passing on the list from one member to another by word of mouth. The last child in each team had to run and write out the entire list. We played this in two rounds - juniors (only 5 items) and seniors (with 10 items).

As the lists were marked by Christabel and Nushrat, Leslie, shared a very special memory tip. Our DI children learnt the trick to remember lists. Leslie demonstrated the efficacy of the method by making them practise memorising using his trick and little Anisha remembered the entire list using the special method taught. In this day where we rely on gadgets to remind us about just about everything, this was a life skill well learnt.

What am I? As the name suggests, this game of dumb charades had the teams enacting names of important historical monuments and personalities. From the Leaning Tower of Pisa, to the Pryamids of Giza, from Sanchi Stupa to Eiffel tower, the teams came together to enact and guess.

(The Pyramids of Giza never made it to the top) 

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(The Sanchi Stupa had a number of Buddhas posing)

 

(The Great Wall of China ... need we say more?)

Levers, this game needed the children to use their imagination, experience and thinking skills to build a lever with only 2 rulers, an eraser, a rubberband and a pencil. Children worked hard at building their levers. The levers were fabricated and trialed. Each lever had to deliver an eraser from a table to over a red line, 5 ft away.

The young engineers had erasers and scales flying around. One eraser in the trials went to the sky and never came back down. Uncle Leslie demonstrated how to build a lever.

It was time for the results. We had a tie for the second place with Red and Green both scoring 26. The winning team Blue scored 36 points. The winning team got to cut the prize chocolate cake.

The library team arranged a special gift for all our DI children. Each child received a little diary and a pen, with a special instruction. They were asked to write down 5 new words every day. We hope our children will borrow books from our DI library, read the books and discover new words.

A wonderful evening came to an end with the children receiving their box of delicious snacks from Saldanha Bakery and juice. The chocolatey cake was soon polished off. We all had a great evening and look forward to the next workshop next month.

With special thanks to the Library team of Christabel and Nushrat assisted by Rajashree, Sreemoyee, Simran and Leslie (with content support from Mohore).

[Photos by Roshan Choudhury and Simran Kaur]