My friends organised an event named ‘Art for Everyone’ where they had planned a collaboration with a government school. The idea was to go, provide resources and help out with art with the children of the school. We took all sorts of resources with us like sketchpens. water colours, poster colours, papers, crayons, pencils and erasers. 2 sessions with kids were planned. In the first session children were instructed to draw and colour anything they wanted to in any medium. And in the second session, we gave them a topic which was ‘Festivals’ and they could draw about any festival they liked.  They learning outcomes I achieved while volunteering in this event were L1, L2, L5, L6 and L7.

L1
Identify own strengths and develop areas for growth
I love to teach underprivileged kids. It gives me a sense of satisfaction and happiness even when it comes with its own difficulties. Back when I was in 9th, I went to a government school every Saturday and taught those kids ‘Dance’. I enjoyed the whole experience. Just like that, this was an opportunity for me to go teach them, improve my teaching skills, improve my patience and learn to find happiness in little things as well. While the students were drawing and some time was left, I myself sat down to paint to appreciate what is around us, take inspiration from the surroundings and also to fit in well with the other children. I am glad I took this experience.

L2
Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills in the process

It was difficult to go and help out students who had not ever use resources such as watercolors and oil pastels. I really enjoyed teaching them the new resources however it was difficult for me to control my instinct to help them out with every aspect. I was instructing them a lot at first, later as time passed, I let them take the lead and only guided them when they asked for help. This way, they would personally develop more and I would learn to control myself.

L5
Demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively
I was not the only volunteer. There were 7-8 more people with me and we were expected to work as a team. The event coordinators had only talked about students from grades 5-8 however, when we reached there, students from grade 1 were present. There were a lot more students than we had expected. So, we divided the team and the other team quickly came up with the idea of giving the younger kids with drawings for them to fill them out with colours. Because we had a team, we were able to pull off this event. Last minute crisis was handled nicely. Because in a team there are a lot of minds working together, it tends to come up with great ideas in less time which is exactly what happened in the first session when there were more kids than we had expected 🙂

L6
Demonstrate engagement with issues of global significance

So many kids around the world don’t have access to so many resources. This event helped us cater to this issue where we provided the access to new resources to the kids and simultaneously provided an opportunity for them to show their talents in ART. This event was a pathway for those children to explore different mediums and try out techniques they had not ever tried out.  After both the sessions ended we donated all the resources we took with us to the students of that school itself. Resources we donated included handmade papers, sketchpens, oil pastels and watercolours. We also donated pencils and erasers as we had a lot of fun with them and wanted to show them our gratitude.

L7
Recognize and consider the ethics of choices and actions

After the first session had ended, we had some time left and we didn’t want the kids to keep waiting while we wrapped things up. Since we were there to teach the kids something new and make them happy, we decided to play little games with them. I made all of them laugh. They enjoyed so much and it made their day; so was ours.