FRIENDS, SPACE AND ALIENS
Do you remember stocking up friendship bands before going to school? All of us used to wait for friendship day each year and gifted friendship bands to our friends. In the month of August, we conducted the first set of Let's Start Art workshops on the same theme. We asked the students to draw their friends and narrate their friendship stories.
"Shubham gets angry very easily, that's why I coloured him Red", said Him, a student of class-5th from Govt Primary School, Bhadaini, when we asked him about his drawing.
Mohit, a student of class-4th at Govt Primary School, Orderly Bazaar, is one of the playful children in the class.
He has started taking interest in art and improved himself in past one year. Initially, he used to finish his drawing early and disturb other students. But now he sits quietly the whole time and completes his drawing.
In this session, he made a drawing of himself with his friend Mayank visiting a mall together.
"In one corner of the painting, my friend and I are playing and in another, we are roaming around together", said Prahalad, a student at Govt Primary School, Sunderpur (1), while telling our instructor that he really liked the theme of this session.
In the second set of art sessions, we asked the students to ponder over the question- 'How exploring space improves life on earth?'. The students made drawings of whatever they knew about space through TV or books.
Rakhi Sahani, a student of class 3rd at Govt Primary School, Bhadaini believes that life on other planets is the same as Earth. She made a drawing of a planet with people and trees on it. She drew them as aliens, like the ones she must have seen on TV.
Gosto here is a great storyteller for his age. A student of class-3rd at Govt Primary School, Sonarpura, he has portrayed a story in his drawing in which bad people from another world come to Earth in their spaceships, and steal from the houses on Earth. "The wires in between the houses are the telephone wires, the people of Earth are talking to each other on phone and warning everyone to be aware of the aliens because these are bad aliens", said Gosto when the instructor asked him about the black lines in his drawing.
Priyanshu, a student of class 5th at Govt Primary School, Sunderpur (1) told us that he has drawn all he knows about space. "The man standing there is a pilot with his rocket, and there is a satellite in the space. And above that, there are spaceships of the aliens who live in the space", he said while explaining his drawing to the instructors.
Let's Start Art is an initiative to make the students more aware of everything around them, to trigger curiosity in the students so that they observe better and make efforts to learn more on their own.
The art sessions at Govt. Primary Schools at Bhadaini, Nagwa, and Orderly Bazaar were conducted by Neelam Gupta and Anjali Singh (Student Artists) and the sessions at Govt. Primary Schools at Sonarpura, Naria, and Sunderpur were conducted by Ajay Prakash and Kavita Kumari (Student Artists). The crayons were provided by Kokuyo Camlin for all the workshops.