With the academic year drawing to a close, and a long summer vacation in sight, Angela Paljor has packed in a bunch of different workshops that will keep you and your little ones not just busy but thoroughly engaged
Summer workshops this season have undergone an upgrade. Much like a reloaded version of skill development, new activities focus on outdoor living (complete with first aid and survival tactics) cultivating mindfulness, developing emotional intelligence, film-making, learning to play musical instruments from across the world and reconnecting kids with their inner selves. In short, if there was an extension of the concept of complete man, you would have a complete child.
Says Anshu Daga, the founder of Inner Startup, who is taking workshops on emotional intelligence, “Being a mother, I realised that we are living in a very fast-paced and chaotic society. Digitisation has created an artificial world, disconnecting people from realism and this is what our children believe our world is. The foundation of the programme is to make the children understand themselves and develop their awareness by working on their five senses. This is to help them take things slow and realise that the world has more to offer through a layered and graded understanding.”
Daga’s workshop at IHC, Cultivating Mindfulness and Emotional Intelligence, works purely on the emotions and not on the intellectual side. She introduces the students to various forms of emotions and accept them as normal rather than suppressing them. Her plan also includes creative theatre, music and movement, games and exercises. She continues, “I teach the students from 7-12 years to be mindful of what they are eating and how they should eat it. We ask them to quantify and express the feel, taste and sensation any food gives when you put it in your mouth.” This would make the world appear as a gigantic 3D experience rather than being flat-screen and anodyne.
These summer workshops are offering a huge age waiver so that everybody can be a part of discovering themselves in a mixed gathering. Suchet Malhotra, a percussionist and music producer, has come up with the creative idea of bringing music to all generations. “I am just the custodian of instruments. I do not keep myself restricted to any age group as every person is inclined to one or the other instrument by birth but has never had the opportunity to explore them. The workshop is divided into two groups. Those below 10 are accompanied by the parents and the second group is for those above 10. The intention is that the parents and children get to spend time and learn together in their stressed and regimented lives. The workshop is a journey through sound. One learns about the history of music, its origin and the music instruments the world developed along with playing them.”
With the workshop, Stories through Sound: World Percussion Instruments, they are able to travel across the world through music and feel free to be creative. One feels a sense of wonder looking at the abundance of music and appreciating native culture as expressed through it. There’s west African djembe, middle-eastern darbouka, Brazilian rainstick, Australian didgeridoo, nature sounds, forest sounds and a vast range of rhythmic percussion instruments, such as shakers and tambourines, which are meant to enhance our sense of hearing.
Aerie Backcounty Medicine and Hanifl Centre for Outdoor Education is offering a summer workshop in Wilderness First Aid (WFA) Course and Essential Skills for Outdoor Education, which is open to anyone above 16 years. The WFA course provides a great introduction to managing crisis in a remote stretch. The course focusses on injury and illness prevention, patient assessment, long-term injury management, improvised splint and litter construction and environmental emergencies. “Teaching students to make impromptu survival gear is rewarding because it’s tangible. Seeing students gain knowledge/skills that empower them is as perceptible as picking up and unzipping a finished bag,” says Dara McDevitt, WFA instructor.
Meanwhile documentary maker Smina Mishra will introduce children between 12 and 14 years to record their visual experiences with their own perspective and edit them. The workshop gives the children a platform to discover the process of making shorts, brainstorming ideas for shooting and editing and actively being a part of the production process. For the first time, these workshops are not only about acquiring skills but applying them in real life situations.