Unleashing inner creativity as a therapy

Workshop at Amar Jyoti
12th Feb 2011

Nothing is more powerful than the smile on a child’s face. Now multiply this by 129, and you will get a small sense of what SETU staff and volunteers experienced on February 12th!

In order to interact with the kids and to help them discover themselves, SETU team conducted a workshop for the Amar Jyoti Charitable Trust’s kids on 12th of Feb 2011. One of our leading volunteers was Hetal Shah, fellow of indicorps, a USA based organization. Around 129 children ( inclusive of physically & mentally challenged kids) attended the highly interactive and fun-loving session.

The workshop consisted of two activities “Speak up!” and “vegetable block painting”. The first activity “Speak up” was an ice breaker activity, aimed at bringing the children out of their shells, to build up their confidence level and to make them aware about their inner self so that they can be clear about what they want to be in the future. As part of the activity, children were provided with small pieces of paper with numbers from 1 to 5 written on them. What the kids had to do was to open the paper and tell as many things about them as the number. Initially, the kids were a bit shy about the whole activity; to remove their hesitation SETU team and volunteers helped them out and also offered kids with chocolates as incentive.

A child’s imagination is full of colors, and to add more colors to it, especially in the lives of these differently-abled kids, we planned a “vegetable block painting” activity where the children were asked to paint using different vegetables and a brush. The basic purpose of carrying out this activity was to introduce the kids to their creative side which is necessary for a child’s all round development. For the task, they were provided with vegetables like, potatoes, okra, carrots etc. cut in different shapes, color plates and pastel colors. Kids were asked to dip vegetable in the color and make an impression of it on the paper. Result was incredible! Children made beautiful drawings, high above the expectations! With beautiful flowers, houses, faces, landscapes, we were thoroughly impressed by their creativity, one of them even made SETU’s logo!!

SETU team and volunteers along with teachers at Amar Jyoti, assisted children in the activities. In order to increase participation we distributed chocolates and snacks among the kids.

The best part, of course, was seeing the 129 smiles as each child left the room. We hope to do more activities like this with Amar Jyoti in the future. It was a day to cherish forever!