Gandhiji’s birthday is a big deal in our school. We start with International Peace Day on Sept 21, then we do Pennies For Peace, then we talk about Gandhiji – the peaceful warrior and end the peace/non-violence theme by celebrating United Nations Day. Our school is closed for Gandhiji’s birthday every year.

This has been our routine for the three years we have been with this school. But the girls are growing and this Oct 1st and Oct 2nd we had a lot of talk about Gandhiji at home.

Mieja’s questions:
Did a english man shooted Gandhiji?
An Indian man did? But, why Amma? Gandhiji is the father of India. Why would the ‘goat person’ kill his own dad?
Did Gandhiji die in the darkness or something? What time of the day was it?
When he was shooted, how did he fall?
Why is he dressed like that? He has no shirts? Was Gandhi poor? He had no money to buy shirts? Is that why he is naked?

Chula’s questions:
Why do you say Gandhi Jayanthi Amma?
Is it like Krishna Jayanthi? Does Jayanthi mean birthday? Chadurthi is Ganesha’s birthday too. So why are we not saying Gandhi Chadurthi?

Chula had her shower almost by herself and dressed up in a pattu pavadai. Then she came running to me and said that she was ready. When I asked her ready for what, she replied that she is ready to celebrate the jayanthi or chadurthi or whatever it is, demanded why I haven’t set up Gandhiji’s picture, decked it with flowers and wanted to know what special Gandhi food I had cooked.

I promised her we will do something special in an hour and quickly planned some art work, books, songs and special food.

The food part was the easiest – peanut sundal and milk. One more thing to love about Gandhi, it is so easy-peasy to prepare his favorite food. Chula wanted to sing Ragupathi Raghava, so we did that. We read Marching To Freedom By Pratham, (special thanks to Chox aunty for sending  special books to the girls) and Dandi March is making quite an effect in Mieja’s mind. I can sense questions brewing. We also have Picture Gandhi by Tulika, The Story Of Dandi March by Tulika and Gandhi: His Life In Pictures. We thumbed through all the books.

I have to admit that I was a little lost for the art part. Then I decided to talk about how simple lines can form a drawing, profile vs front view. I showed then the famous question mark profile drawing of Gandhi, how such simple lines can be representative of Gandhi. Mieja wanted to draw and Chula wanted to write an essay. So this is what we ended up doing.

I had been wanting to introduce the liquid water colors that I had purchased a few weeks back. So I did white on white crayon resist and told them that if they paint the canvas they will discover a surprise. They were kicked when they saw Gandhi on their canvas.

They wanted to experiment on crayon resist and this is what they came up with. They can draw themselves with long hair and long curly eye lashes even when they cannot see what they were drawing. LOL!

More summer fun 2010 posts.

Back with the summer posts. This means three things – got myself a decent digital camera, I am refusing to let go of summer and the girls still dig their summer activities.

For a long time now Chula has been writing music. Last year’s summer found Chula sitting with a paper and pencil next to the Melissa and Doug wooden piano. She would play one of her favorite songs, she would practice the sounds again and again till she got a line sounding right and then she would write down the keys.

(Twinkle twinkle little star…. CC GG AA G…..
How I wonder what you are…. FF EE DD C…)

This summer found Chula in front of her keyboard with a pencil and paper. The difference is, she would write the notes first and then test the notes she composed on the keyboard. If it satisfies her, she would proceed to add words to the notes and try making it in to a song. What with my practically non existent musical talents ( a post’s worth material right here 🙂 ), I was amazed to see the child do this.

Mieja must top it some how right?! She came with dance choreography!!!! She traced her foot on paper, cut it out, cut some general directions and arranged it on the floor. Presenting Mieja’s choreograph for Chula’s recent music composition…..

(From left to right, clockwise, starting @ purple feet…

feet = step, X = freeze, -> = slide, curled -> = spin, ? = jump)

PS: The child is a horrible teacher. Absolutely no patience I say. She comes with all this fancy-shamncy slip-n-slide-n-jump-n-flip-n-spin steps and expects me to keep up. She gets so worked up if I don’t do justice to her vision. All I ask is to sit with my head between my knees to control the dizziness from perfecting my spin. Is it too much? So if she invites me for a lesson, I have learnt to say that my tail bone hurts and that my doctor has asked me not to dance.

We read couple of disastrous books about the fictional life of grade school children….. I was in half mind to withdraw the girls from school, post kindergarten….That is when we stumbled across Gooney Bird Greene series by Lois Lowry.

I thumbed through the book and quickly digested that the book was about a quirky little girl in second grade. Gooney Bird who tells tall tales, has an ‘interesting’ fashion sense and has an exceptionally high level of confidence. At first it reminded me of Pippi Longstockings, but Lois Lowry does manage to differentiate this very Pippi-like character, well at least in my mind. While Pippi made me a little sad, I did not have this lump in my throat and a heavy heart when I read Gooney Bird. Pippi leaves you wondering if her claim that she has super human strength and that she can bake a 100 dozen cookies in an hour are true. But Gooney Bird assures that all her stories are 100% real, though her stories are ‘HOW GOONEY BIRD CAME TO THE TOWN OF WATERTOWER, USA FROM CHINA ON A FLYING CARPET’, ‘HOW GOONEY BIRD’S BELOVED PET CAT, CATMAN, GOT CONSUMED BY A COW’, ‘HOW SHE GOT LATE FOR SCHOOL BECAUSE SHE WAS DIRECTING THE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA’.

And yes, all of Gooney’s stories are true. For those of you asking me are flying carpets true? can cows eat cats? can a second grader conduct an orchestra? All I can say is, pick a book and find out for yourself.

I loved Gooney because of her confidence, her curiosity to be in the middle of things, her genuine effort to help her friends and her ability to transform and inspire even the shiest child in the classroom. Also through Gooney Bird, Lois Lowry tells her readers how to write a story! She talks about the components of a story – how to choose a title, how to keep the audience interested, when to add ‘suddenly’ and give a twist in the story, descriptions etc. She also talk about how to tell a true story full of facts and numbers without boring the audience, how to write a fiction based on real historical characters, ambiguous endings which open up different possibilities and such. Creative writing 101 !

What endeared Gooney Bird to Mieja was Gooney’s fashion sense. With her three pony tails, cowboy boots on pajama pants, velvet coats, fashion scarfs etc, Gooney and Mieja are soul sisters. She is also thinking deeply about emotions. When ever I read, ‘she slumped her shoulders’ or ‘he scowled’, she asks me to act out slumping shoulders or scowling and she is processing the information.

Chula adores Gooney Bird because of her stories. I can see that Chula can’t get enough of them. She is inspired and wants to write her own stories and look up dictionaries (Yes! That is the current passion! If there is a word she does not understand she looks it up in webster, the old school way. )

Yay to Gooney Bird and we are sad that we have only one more Gooney bird book that we haven’t read 🙁

Yay to Lois Lowry for her faith and respect in young people and her ability to simplify information without being condescending.

I have five more SummerFun posts, but my digital camera stopped focusing for some reason and I am struggling to get good pictures from the phone. So I am taking a small break from the SummerFun posts. Meanwhile at UTBTville…..

Ten days back, R left for a three week trip to India. He visualized the girls coming to airport and giving him a grand send off with plenty of hugs and kisses. But both C and M backed out the very last minute and all he got was me. After he walked in to security, I waved bye and guess what I stumbled in to?! The SFMOMA store at the airport. No strings attached, I mean it quite literally, I spent an hour just drooling over the things they had. R called just before he boarded the flight and was taken aback that I was still at the airport. Even key words such as budget, quality, unique etc did not put him at ease. After ten years of marriage he knows that we both have our own definitions about budget, quality and unique.

My SFMOMA find was Charley Harper. His art was simple, symmetrical, precise, balanced, brought some kind of order to my slightly obsessive compulsive brain and made me wonder if Sanjay Patel was inspired by Charley Harper. There were a whole bunch of alphabet books and counting books based on his prints. I can see myself purchasing the books for my classroom. The color yourself Charley Harper calendar, I would love to implement a DYI version at home.

I bought two board books for my classroom, Kangaroos Have Joeys by Phillipa-Alys Browne and Matisse Dance With Joy. Both were on sale for under ten dollars and I couldn’t resist.

For Chula and Mieja I bought….

Go Fish Art Card Game

Hypotrochoid Art Set

50 Optical Illusion Cards

The hypotrochoid art set is such a hit. The girls mixed and matched gears and covered stacks of papers with hypotrochoids. Chula loves the Go Fish art games. Half the time she just sits and stares at the cards. They haven’t caught on with the optical illusions. They think I am seeing things and give me odd looks.

The things drooled over….

A Book Of Sleep	Wire Bloom, wire clips	Foldable Flower Vase
Memo Holder	Magnetic Key Holder	Magnetic Rings
Wine Tote	Magnetic Flower Vase	Flowing Mobile
Silicone Place Mat	Stapler	Magnetic Paper Clip Holder

Window shopping is so much fun!!

More SummerFun posts.

What do you do if you  lurve the feel, smell and flow of glue and if you happen to have a gallon size glue container at home? Glue batik…. and it was a HUGE hit, not just with the kids, I fell head over heels in love with it.

1)A piece of white cotton fabric. I happened to have about a yard of left over fabric that I trimmed to size for the girls.

2)Glue. Preferably in some easy squeeze bottles. I cleaned out the nozzle and mixed some water with the glue to make the squeezing process easy on the girls.

3)Squeeze the glue. Let it drip. Let it flow. Watch it fall. Have fun. When done, let fabric dry over night.

4)Acrylic paint, thinned down with lots of water. Paint over the fabric. Let fabric dry over night.

5)The next day soak the fabric in warm-hot water and scrub out the glue. Ta-da!!! Patterned cloth designed by your child. How amazing is that?

I cut the fabric to size, glued it to tetra-paks and made containers. These are hand made gifts boxes for the girls’ teachers.

I was so taken with the concept that I made some greeting cards with couple of styles of Ganesh.

This one is only half done, but I couldn’t wait to share this Ganesha in my favorite blue color. (Original inspiration here, isn’t it lovely?!)

PS: The activity started with Sruthi’s Aug glue challenge, but we quite didn’t make it before Aug 20.

More SummerFun posts.

Apologizing in advance for poor picture quality. Our digital cam is shot and I have to make do with pics from phone.

Just before summer break started, Mieja had started movable alphabets and numbers. For a long time, much to the amusement of people at home, this child was counting “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 17, 53. I am done amma”. She started counting in order just before summer break and to me it was indicative of her grasp of symbolic representation of objects. Also her KE+O+T+R+U+C+K spelling started getting closer to the norm. During summer break we read a lot of books at home, but looks like she needed the stimulation of writing and sounding out alphabets. Some afternoons, Mieja would ask me to work with her on her writing.

I would doodle something like this

on one side of the paper and ask her to try spelling it on the other side. For the most part she did pretty well.

She was so taken with the concept of picture clues and she started playing quiz master. I have to admit that I struggled quite a bit with a few picture clues. I couldn’t decipher eraser and spoon.

Mieja’s condition is that she would sound out the word and I write. She would say F-R-A-M for frame and by my conditioning I would write FRAME. Same with words like easel(E-S-E-L). Reminded me of ‘Ek gauv mein ek kissan raguthatha‘ movie clip. She waved her hands, sighed and complained that I am not listening to her sounds 🙂

In accordance to Murphy’s law, Chula ploinked herself next to us and demanded that she NEEDS me pronto. So I had  to convience her that she needs challenging work and had her occupied with crosswords such as these. She did pretty well with some help from me and I did pretty well with help from Boo, YaadaYaada and PV 🙂

Another toy that helped us with Chula’s addition/substraction phase and Mieja’s counting/addition phase  – the IKEA abacus. May the person who designed this toy live long and prosper.

More SummerFun posts.

Fuse bead work….

…..sock puppets…

….and the construction of a puppet theater…

…..lead to many, many, many, m.a.n.y stories 🙂

More SummerFun posts.

This is a popular activity at home. I first saw this in FamilyFun Magazine at the pediatrician’s waiting room. This activity has sustained us through last year’s winter vacation.

1. Two weeks supply of newspaper, tape and  a pencil. Stack five sheets of newspaper. With the pencil at one corner start rolling the newspaper. When done, tape the end so that the tube does not open. Make several tubes.

2. These tubes are sturdy and can be used to construct pretty much anything. We took our design to the drawing board. I suggested something and the girls suggested the same thing and claimed that it was different from my thing. We agreed to disagree and started construction.

3. Just staple the ends of the paper tubes to construct.

4. It started as a tent. Of course during the process of construction, the architects changed the design and ended up looking like this.

Then it became a beauty salon. Thanks to Fancy Nancy. Introducing SHIVER ME TIMBERS HOUSE OF BEAUTY. I swear I had no part to play w.r.t the naming. Apparently the things in the beauty house are free. ‘If you like it, you can take it amma’ is what I was told. Mr.President one more business outfit for your stimulus package.

5. I reassured child 2 multiple times that the tent is strong. And what does she do? She climbs on it 🙁

So I cut the tips off and the tubes are ready for the next round of construction.

Try it and I bet you will love it.

More summer fun 2010 posts.

Kolams with my amma. This particular day, they were experimenting on writing letters with the cylinder shaped kolam maker. They were writing the first letter from our names, that explains the ASS you see a the bottom right 🙂

More summer fun 2010 posts.

This continues to be a popular activity since last summer.

	One caddy from Lakeshore @ $4.99
	Two squeegees from IKEA@ $0.99 each
	Two empty spray bottles filled with water
	Two rags
	Hours of fun washing windows = priceless

Given their love for water, I wouldn’t be surprised if they are as excited about window washing the next year also 🙂