My 8 years old and soon to enter 9th year niece is a bundle of love and wonder enlightening my world these days. I have decided –This vacation will be solely for Her. She was not happy with her school and I have identified some problems troubling her.
So, we came to eachother.
I had some pre-planning for her. Which is no more now!
The first plan was to cover-up educational gaps in her classroom processes. I thought of few activities that can be helpful and which may attract her interest. I have to postpone this idea for a time being as soon I realized that she owes a vacation. And more importantly, there are some other areas that we need to work out then the educational one.
So, we started with…nothing particular.
Day one, she taught me a few things, literally : these of my clothes need to wash separately cause they are coloured and you should not apply brush on these ones . I have two rubber bands and I like a tight ponytail, use this butterfly to protect my hair while having bath, give me milk half hour earlier so I get proper pressure, I do not eat chillies much…
And we have fresh mud at the courtyard of our newly built house. She played there almost the whole day.
Slowly, our learning is picking up.
At school, she used to come with me and play. Play in the playground with …soil. She made a snow-gola, a cake and a glass-gola. Vinaben asked her for and orange-gola. After few minutes, she came up with orange coloured mud-gola !
She observes things sharply. Sometimes she expresses it loudly but mostly she just makes some sound. So, I keep on asking her, what have you seen? I don’t want to miss the wonderful and beautiful world she sees.
She is a listener. She listen everything, even when she makes an indifferent face. She pretends not to listen when she don’t want to do what is being said. So, I learnt not to continue when she is pretending not-listening. It works.
She is a girl ! sent percent! Interfering my tomboyish life. She likes to dress up and comments on my dressing. One noon, I gave her my duppata to cover her face and arms, she said, ‘ take the duppata as soon as we reach that place, you should not go without it, its indecent !” she started inquiring about my body and my cloths. At first, it was disturbing for me that such a small girl has such questions. I have to face facts and I bravely did so. So, then onwards, I have started to answer all her questions without hiding anything, in a manner she can understand. It is really a challenge-to explain this subject and to explain it simply.
And she likes to keep secretes and sharing them in ears !
She has a fine hand. She do things neatly and minutely and in smaller scale. She is very good at housekeeping. Yesterday she oiled my hairs so perfectly.
She copies writings, copies for hours. This is what her school has done to her. Give her a novel and she will copy it. So, we decided, rather I forced her, not to write a single letter during vacation. In case she has itching for writing, just pick up a crayon or brush and draw something. She agreed, without her fevourite question –why? May be she also understands that this is not normal. Though, after a week she asked. ‘why?’ and I replied, I don’t know but I wish you do this. And she agreed.
Since long back, I tried to make her sing few songs, but failing due to some of the reasons. This time, I started singing without asking and indulging her. She herself asked me to sing with her ‘aakashganga’ by Tagor-Meghani. That moment was a joy for me. Now, we sing a good number of different songs. A gujarati song ‘duniya aakhkhi ma mare che’ is being sung in que-ans manner : I sing it like que(it is in questioning form) and she gives answers to it. One day she asked, have you wrote this? I said ‘no’ and with a bit of confused hesitation added, ‘it is by Tagore’.Later, she caught a photo in my cupboard and asked, ‘is this Tagor?’ I was happily surprised because the photo was of Rajnish and with beard and typical eyes I found similarities between those two personalities! Also, I don’t know that she had ever seen a photo of Tagore, may be at her school.
One thing is common between us, love for stones. I haven’t shown my collection yet because some of them are delicate and very-very precious for me. But, we are collecting new ones as they are in plenty around my newly constructing society. We are also collecting shells. We have seen a mirror decorated by shells and are aiming to make one.
She scored good at school. She can multiply 3digit number with a 2 digit number and even teach that. But, she cannot recongnise bigger number than 100 ! for her medication, we tried a trick to count up to 120 by speaking either odd or even number. She will count only up to 100. She don’t enter into a situation where it declares that she don’t know something. That is why she do not read storybooks. Once identified this , now I read for her. Activities for math are in queue, suggestions are welcome. Also, she has not clear ideas about distances and other measurements.
I used to ask her, help me in work at home. Then I realized my mistake and changed my wording : it is our house and you should share work with me.
She had a habit of asking and making promises. Every time I ask that will do this, she will ask, ‘promise?’ For a few times I responded ‘Yes’. But, then I started, as I said it, I will do it. No promise-bomis. Now, she is getting this slowly. She is not asking me ‘promise?’ every time.
What interests her? -is the prime concern for me these days and I try to plan everything accordingly. That doesn’t mean that I do everything as she wishes. But, we negotiate about thing to do and not to do and most importantly, ’why so’.
One very important lesson I have learnt from her is- a child never lies and a child has always a genuine question; genuine up to level of life and death. It is very very much important to respond accordingly. In the middle of my sleep she would ask-what is in the white bag? And I must try to know why she is asking this. She waves stories about her friends, father, mother, home, places, dreams… they are easily achieved data to understand her psychological and cognitive processes.
